Awards

NASA Fellowship

The NASA Fellowship in the History of Space Technology, offered by SHOT and supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) History Division, funds either a predoctoral or postdoctoral fellow for up to one academic year to undertake a research project related to the history of space technology. The fellowship supports advanced research related to all aspects of space history, leading to publications on the history of space technology broadly considered, including cultural and intellectual history, institutional history, economic history, history of law and public policy, and history of engineering and management. Effective 2017, SHOT, the History of Science Society (HSS), and the American Historical Association (AHA) are bringing their NASA Fellowship Committees together. Each society will continue to award a NASA Fellowship, but a committee consisting of one member from each organization will determine the winners of the three fellowships. This year's SHOT-NASA fellowship was awarded to Alexander C. T. Geppert of New York University's Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. The citation follows:

The winner of the 2017 SHOT-NASA Fellowship is Dr. Alexander T. Geppert, Associate Professor of History and European Studies at New York University (NYU) Shanghai, and Global Network Associate Professor of History and European Studies in NYU's Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and Department of History, for his proposed book project The Future in the Stars: Time and Transcendence in the European Space Age, 1942–1972. A specialist in modern European history, Professor Geppert has, for the last ten years, led a series of international collaborations aimed at contextualizing the history of space exploration and establishing the formal study of "astroculture." He has undertaken several successful conferences in Germany on the subject of the international imaginings of outer space and space exploration, events that drew the participation of a large portion of the space history community and that resulted in dozens of scholarly publications. His proposal, The Future in the Stars, significantly extends and expands upon this work, building on a decade of collaborative international research on the origins and impact of scientific and popular enthusiasm for spaceflight. In his proposal, Professor Geppert seeks to move beyond traditional Cold War explanations of the origins of space exploration and locate western European enthusiasm for space travel in older conceptions of the future, of utopia, and of its discontents throughout the twentieth century. An ambitious transnational and transdisciplinary research project, The Future in the Stars promises to further develop space history's increasing exploration of the cultural meaning of technology, complementing existing American and Russian studies with long-awaited scholarly work on western European astroculture, from the creation of international expert networks, to the development of space exploration infrastructures, to influential popular fascinations with extraterrestrial life and the colonization of distant planets. Thoughtful, well theorized, and expertly described, The Future in the Stars is a project sure to add greatly to existing scholarship and open new vistas of research for tomorrow's historians of technology.

Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship

This award is in memory of the co-founder of SHOT and honors Melvin Kranzberg's many contributions to developing the history of technology as a field of scholarly endeavor and SHOT as a professional organization. The $4,000 award is given to a doctoral student engaged in the preparation of a dissertation on the history of technology, broadly defined, and may be used in any way chosen by the winner to advance the research and writing of that dissertation. This year's award went to Adewumi Damilola Adebayo, St. John's College, University of Cambridge, for "Electricity, Economy and Society in Southern Nigeria, 1896–1972," with the following citation:

The Kranzberg committee awards this year's fellowship to Adewumi Damilola Adebayo for research in support of his dissertation, "Electricity, Economy and Society in Southern Nigeria, 1896–1972." Adebayo is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Cambridge. His novel and compelling work explores the "complex history of the production and use of electricity" in southern Nigeria during and after colonialism. In it, he asks vital new questions about the management of electricity, the extraction of natural resources, inequality, industrialization, and urbanization...