The GHS is proud to announce the winners of the 2024 Postgraduate Essay Prize! Congratulations to:

1st place: Jonathan Steuer (University of Oxford), ‘Petty crime in the early modern city: A comparative analysis of Frankfurt am Main and Bristol’

2nd place (joint): Carl Julius Reim (UCL/QMUL), ‘Critical Solidarity: Adorno, the Darmstadt Avant-garde, and the Administered World’

2nd place (joint): Rory Hanna (University of Sheffield), ‘Early Democratisers? West German Students’ Campaigns for Participation in University Governance during the Late Adenauer Era’

In first place, Steuer’s essay demonstrates the usefulness and benefit of utilising comparative methodology in the history of early modern crime. Through comparing petty offences the essay presents us with a window into how socio-political considerations affected how the urban elites conceptualised, punished, and recorded crime. Regarding gender, the essay highlights shared documentation biases of the courts as well as local opportunities for female agency in both Frankfurt am Main and Bristol. The essay calls for historians of early modern crime to further venture beyond national and regional settings.

The joint second place Reim’s essay examines Theodor Adorno’s musical thought and the poliotical implications of this which the author deems necessary to understand Adorno’s concept of an ‘administered world’.

Also in joint second place Hanna’s essay demonstrates how insights into student activism in the years before ‘1968’ can help us to reach a clearer assessment of the scale and pace of democratisation in early West Germany.

Congratulations to all three of our winners!