Hundley and Lifka Dissertation Prize Winners
Congratulations to the following graduate students for winning the Hundley and Lifka Dissertation Prize Winners!
HUNDLEY PRIZE
Peter Chesney, “Drive Time: A Sensory History of Car Cultures from 1945 to 1990 in Los Angeles”
The Department’s Thesis Prize committee is pleased to award the Hundley Prize to Peter Chesney. Chesney’s thesis, “Drive Time: A Sensory History of Car Cultures from 1945 to 1990 in Los Angeles” is a creative, provocative intervention into Los Angeles social and cultural history. By using “car culture” as a place to explore social differences, sensory human experience, and urban history, “Drive Time” leaves those of us all too aware of the centrality of automobiles to Los Angeles—and the United States at large—with new insights. The familiar trope of suburban white flight in the 1960s, for instance, is rendered freshly by considering windshields, car radio, and the act of driving itself as racialized—and unfortunately racist—acts. Los Angeles’s complex multiracial, multicultural landscape is reinterpreted through the cultural and social productions and interactions of Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, whites, and other social groups in surprising, creative ways. In short, Chesney tells a new history of the American West—one understood not only through global interconnections, but new domestic ones, as well, centering on how cars refracted and reproduced new social and cultural relations off and on the road.
To achieve this, Chesney employs a veritable cornucopia of cultural methods and sources. It positions itself vis a vis not only important historical scholarship like Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors and Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, but also art history and museum studies, film studies, other interdisciplinary approaches. Popular music lyrics, youth protest movements, and automobile-level material culture are seamlessly analyzed. Race, gender, class, and spatial and sensory senses of place, time, and experience show the possibilities of marrying traditional history with cutting-edge cultural studies in telling the story of Los Angeles, and the West, through one of its most important icons, the automobile. In so doing, “Drive Time” provides new ways of thinking through many important cultural and technological objects as not just objects, but active subjects and vehicles of history.
LIFKA PRIZE
Lee Sunkyu, “The Cartographic Construction of Border in Ming China”
Lee Sunkyu’s “The Cartographic Construction of Border in Ming China” is a careful, thorough, and innovative piece of scholarship. The question she poses is deceptively modest: why is it that maps in the early 15th century and maps in the 16th century look so different? How can we explain this change? From this small and concrete empirical observation, Lee charts out the broader stakes of this investigation, connecting changing cartographic practices in the early modern Ming with contemporary concerns about the PRC government’s use of a particular conception of Han identity. Who knew that the cartographic journey from ‘borderlands’ to ‘border lines’ could have such a downstream impact, the legacies of which haunt the newspaper headlines of our own day.
Maps form the core of the dissertation’s sources. A much welcomed choice, yet not without challenges. Lee is clear-eyed and honest about the limitations of the sources used, as all historians should be. The steps she takes to remedy their limitations are, however, innovative and even inspiring. Maps for her are portals to great geographic and historic expanses. Not content with one set of cartographic sources, Lee instead compares cartographic materials produced in two geographically different frontier spaces—northern inland frontiers and southern maritime frontiers. She reads maps alongside social, economic, and geopolitical history, interpreting cartographic changes in a richly woven historical context. We learn as much about the workings of empire as about printing booms and the social, political, cultural changes behind them. “Maps,” Lee asserts, “provide a valuable opportunity to explore how the shift in the ideas and images of frontiers was closely intertwined with […] changing historical conditions” (3).
Lee’s sober assessment of the historical evidence, her steady construction of arguments, and her careful conclusions are a mark of mature, insightful scholarship. This is especially valuable given that the era we live in seems to reward exaggerated narratives as bold interventions, and overblown conclusions as contemporary relevance. “The Cartographic Construction of Border in Ming China” is a deserving winner of the Lifka dissertation award.
