The winner of the John Scholes Transport History Prize 2022 was recently announced – our congratulations to Jacob Harris (University of East Anglia, UK) for the paper ‘“Car, car over all, it has taken a terrible hold of us”: Experiencing automobility in interwar Britain & Germany.’
Jacob’s paper highlights that experiences of automobility were heterogeneous, combining the excitement & liberty popularly associated with interwar car use with the banal, frustrating & even terrifying. Motorists like those at the heart of his account, William Miller & Victor Klemperer, felt conflicted about automobility and what it represented. Their inner ambivalence points to important emotional engagements with the car which may help to explain its persistence in 20th-century society & beyond. The international comparative aspects were significant, doing work that isn’t frequently done and which helps open up new avenues for understanding Transport and Mobility History – and beyond.
The prize is supported by the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic & Mobility (T2M) and the publishers of the Journal of Transport History, SAGE. The Editors of the Journal of Transport History will now work with Jacob on publication of the paper, subject to the usual anonymised peer review process. Our thanks to all competition entrants, to T2M and SAGE, and to the competition review panel.
The 2023 competition is now open – further details here, with a deadline of 31 July 2023: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/jth/john-scholes-prize
All best wishes,
Dr Mike Esbester
University of Portsmouth
Associate Editor, Journal of Transport History