The Turriano ICOHTEC Prize for books on the history of technology (formerly ICOHTEC Prize for Young Scholars) is sponsored by the Juanelo Turriano Foundation of Madrid, Spain, and consists of 2,500 Euro. Each year the prize-winning book is presented and discussed at a special session of the following ICOHTEC symposium. An additional 500 Euro is available to the winner in support of traveling to the conference to receive the prize.
Call for submissions for 2026
The Turriano ICOHTEC Prize is an Early Career Prize for Books on the history of technology, sponsored by the Juanelo Turriano Foundation and consists of 2,500 Euro. The prize-winning book will be presented and discussed at a special session of the next ICOHTEC symposium.
ICOHTEC, the International Committee for the History of Technology, is interested in the history of technology, focusing on technological development as well as its relationship to science, society, economy, culture, and the environment. The history of technology covers all periods of human history and all populated areas. There is no limitation as to theoretical or methodological approaches.
Eligible for the prize are original book-length works in any of the official ICOHTEC languages (English, French, German, Russian or Spanish) in the history of technology: published or unpublished Ph.D. dissertations or other monographs written by scholars in the early stages of their career. Articles and edited anthologies are not eligible. If the work is a Ph.D. thesis, it should have been accepted by your university in 2024 or 2025; if it is a published work, the year of publication should be 2024 or 2025.
For the ICOHTEC Prize 2026, please send an electronic copy (PDF or Word) of the work you wish to be considered for the prize to each of the four Prize Committee members. (Note: Hard copies are only accepted for published works not available electronically.) Your submission must be emailed no later than 15th June 2026. Please also include an abstract of no more than a half-page in length. If your book is in Spanish or Russian, please also supply a summary in English, French or German of about 4,500 words. In that case, the prize committee will find additional members who are familiar with the language in which your book is written.
The submission should be accompanied by a CV (indicating also the date of birth) and, if applicable, a list of publications. Applicants are free to add references or reviews of the work submitted.
Any materials sent to the prize committee will not be returned.
Send a complete application by email to each of the following Prize
Committee members:
Dr. Darina Martykánová (Chairperson)
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Spain
Dr. Klaus Staubermann
German Port Museum
Germany
Dr. Matti La Mela
Uppsala University
Sweden
Dr. Jacopo Pessina
Department of Civilisations and Forms of Knowledge
University of Pisa
Italy
The Winners
2024:
Jacob Ward for his Visions of a Digital Nation. Market and Monopoly in British Communications, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2023
ex aequo
Francesco d’Amaro for his Antipatriotas del Agua. Conflictos y grupos de interés en el Franquismo, Granada: Comares, 2022.
2023 :
Henk-Jan Dekker, for his Cycling Pathways. The Politics and Governance of Dutch Cycling Infrastructure, 1920-2020 (Amsterdam University Press, 2022).
ex aequo
Diana Montaño, for her Electrifying Mexico. Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City (University of Texas Press, 2021).
A honourable mention:
Helen Ahner for her Planetarien. Wunder der Technik – Techniken des Wunderns. (Wallstein Verlag, 2023).
2022 :
Waqar L. Zaidi for his Technological Internationalism and World Order. Aviation, Atomic Energy, and the Search for International Peace, 1920–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
ex aequo
Sébastien Pautet for his dissertation Le defi chonois des Lumières. Savoirs techniques et économie politique en France au temps des circulations sino-européennes (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), (PhD Thesis, Université Paris VII , 2021).
2021 : Hyeok Hweon Kang for his dissertation Crafting Knowledge: Artisan, Officer, and the Culture of Making in Chosŏn Korea, 1392–1910 (PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 2020).
Two honourable mentions:
Philippe Bruyèrre, La puissance du vent (PUM, Toulouse, 2020)
Martin Meiske, Die Geburt des Geoengineerings (Deutsches Museum,
Wallstein 2021, defended as dissertation in 2020).
2020 : There were two winners of Turriano ICOHTEC Prize in 2020:
Claas Kirchhelle for his book Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020);
Nicolas Simoncini for his PhD thesis Histoire de la recherche sur les piles à combustible en France des années soixante aux années quarte-vingt (defended at the Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard in December 2018.
A honourable mention:
Lucía Jimena Juárez, Trading Nations: Architecture, Informal Empire, and the Scottish Cast Iron Industry in Argentina (PhD thesis, The University of Edinburgh, March 2018).
2019 : Maria Rikitianskaia for her dissertation European Radiotelegraphy and World War I: A Transnational Perspective, 1912 – 1927 (defended at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano in October 2018).
Three honourable mentions:
Jaroslav Švelch, Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018.)
Pauline Lewis, Wired Ottomans: A Sociotechnical History of the Telegraph and the Modern Ottoman Empire, 1855-1911 (PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, December 2018).
Barbara Berger, Der Gasbehälterals Bautypus. Baukonstruktionsgeschichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. In England entwickelt, in Deutschland optimiert, weltweitverbreitet – gezeigt am Beispiel Italiens. PhD thesis, Technische Universität München, May 2018.
2018 : Lino Camprubi, Los ingenieros de Franco. Ciencia, catolicismo y Guerra Fría en el Estado franquista (Barcelona: Crítica, 2017).
Two honorable mentions:
Jonas van der Straeten, Transmitting development. Global networks and the development of local grids in the electrification of East Africa, 1906-1970. PhD thesis, Darmstadt 2017.
David López López and Marta Domènech Rodríguez, Tile vaults. Structural analysis and experimentation. 2nd Gustavino Biennal. Disputació de Barcelona 2017.
2017 : Brice Cossart, Les artilleurs et la Monarchie Catholique: Fondements technologiques et scientifiques d’un empire transocéanique (The Gunners and the Catholic Monarch War: Technology and Science in the Shaping of a Transoceanic Empire), defended at the European University Institute in Florence in 2016 .
2016 : Vanessa Meikle Schulman, Work sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.
2015 : Karena Kalmbach, Meanings of a Disaster: The Contested ‘Truth’ about Chernobyl. British and French Chernobyl Debates and the Transnationality of Arguments and Actors, a dissertation completed in September 2014 at the European University Institute, Florence, Department of History and Civilization.
2014 : Dora Vargha, Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs: Governing Polio in Cold War Hungary 1952-1963, a dissertation completed at Rutgers University in 2013, under the direction of Paul Hanebrink.
2013 : Laura Ann Twagira, Women and Gender at the Office du Niger (Mali), dissertation defended at Rutgers University.
2012 : Hermione Giffard, The development and production of turbojet aero-engines in Britain, Germany and the United States, 1936-1945, dissertation defended at Imperial College, University of London, in 2011 (not yet published)
2011: Christopher Neumaier, Dieselautos in Deutschland und den USA, Zum Verhältnis von Technologie, Konsum und Politik, 1949 –2005 (Stuttgart, 2010).
2010 : Anne-Katrine Ebert, Ein Ding der Nation? Das Fahrrad in Deutschland und den Niederlanden, 1880-1940: Eine vergleichende Konsumgeschichte, dissertation defended at the University of Bielefeld, Germany.
2009 : Anna Storm, Hope and Rust: Reinterpreting the Industrial Place in the Late 20th Century (Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology, 2008).