This award is in memory of the co-founder of the Society, 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 $4000 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.
For: “(Green) Revolution among Engineers. Epistemic Communities and Hydric Expertise in Cold War Chile.”
The committee is delighted to award the 2023 Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship to Felipe Trujillo. Trujillo is a doctoral student in the Instituto de Historia at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Trujillo’s research explores how engineers in Cold War Chile creatively redirected international funding for hydrology and agriculture toward local and national priorities. This impressive dissertation project traces the transnational personal and professional trajectories of more than fifty Chilean engineers during the 1960s and 1970s. Approaching the “Green Revolution” from Chilean standpoints, Trujillo sheds light on the ways in which local experts and communities influenced international technical development. Priorities for water projects, he suggests, were less imposed from above than shaped at the grass roots by engineers who leveraged international study and collaboration to develop a distinctly Chilean set of knowledges, practices, projects, and priorities. Trujillo’s research contributes to growing efforts to recenter transnational historiographies of technology and technical development by grounding them in the Global South.
Trujillo will use the Kranzberg Fellowship funding to conduct archival research at the University of California, Davis, an institution at which numerous Chilean engineers pursued educational opportunities and developed enduring collaborations.