Great news! Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 2, 2017, at 7:11 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello SIGCIS,
Some exciting news from the awards banquet last night at the Business History Conference.
Our own Gerardo Con Diaz won the Kroos prize for best dissertation with his 2016 Yale thesis "Intangible Inventions: A History of Software Patenting in the United States, 1945-1985." This is an award that the BHC takes very seriously – the finalists present their dissertations in a 90 minute plenary session to close out conference. Afterwards I heard several very prominent business historians rooting for Con to win, which he duly did a few hours later.
Both of the best article prizes went to “IBM Rebuilds Europe: The Curious Case of the Transnational Typewriter,” by Petri Paju and (ahem) me. Those are the Scranton Prize for the best overall article in Enterprise and Society and the Wilkins prize for the best on comparative or international business. The paper comes out of our shared experience in the Software for Europe project, reflecting the challenge posed by Gerard Alberts to find a way to deliver on his promise of connecting the history of information technology to the development of transnational European identity. Petri did all the hard work and the meticulous research – my contribution was strictly in rewriting, editing, framing, etc. Which was great fun, particularly the chance to get Hitler, J.G. Ballard and Miss Congeniality into the same paper. As I said in accepting the award, we hadn’t expected an article on typewriter supply chains in the 1940s to seem to topical. I therefore thanked Trump, Brexit, and Putin for making the case for this research. Preprint at http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/IBMRebuildsEuropePREPRINT.pdf.
The history of computing is not as well represented on the BHC program as it has recently been at SHOT, but there was also a strong “maintainers” themed panel with Rebecca Slayton, Nathan Ensmenger, Andrew McGee and Ellan Spero.
Best wishes,
Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org