The universe has smiled on me

At the beginning of January I found an interesting conference. Though I was a bit late submitting an application to be a speaker, I tried my luck. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my PhD journey.

The Second International Drive History Conference will take place between 12-14 April in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It is organised by the Historic Vehicle Association together with The Revs Institute and the Society of Automotive Historians (SAH) among others. I am a member of the SAH for many years. In early January I checked their website for updates and that’s when I spotted the conference. The deadline for wannabe speakers has already passed, but in a spur of the moment decision, I sent them a summary of my thesis. Couple days has passed and then out of the blue one of the organisers sent me a note.

It turned out he liked my proposal. He liked it a lot. And “it just so happens that your topic touches on a gap identified by other peer reviewers for a book project that I am editing with Routledge on automotive heritage”. I had two weeks to create an abridged, 5000 words long version of my thesis, annotate it and submit it. Lo and behold – I will be a Routledge-published author!
And then my proposal was also accepted to be presented at the conference. Yes, the universe has really smiled on me.

As for the actual thesis. It is now 80 percent complete and my supervisor just expressed his happiness on my progress. I still plan to finish the first draft by the end of April. Will keep you posted on this 🙂

Elsewhere, life is hectic as usual. Beside going on my last field trip to the BMW Museum and archive tomorrow and attending the Historic Vehicle Conference in Allentown in April (and spending two days in Leicester before that) I have three upcoming exhibitions:
– A mini version of my 2015 exhibition on the history of Hungarian motor car trade will be part of an autoshow in Budapest between 23-25 March
– On 26 April the Balassi Institute in Istanbul will host an exhibition on the 1912 Budapest-Constantinapole automobile touring race
– And in October there will be a big exhibition in Budapest featuring the life and works of the Korbuly family, who were engineers working at the Weiss Manfred Co. and after the war at the Csepel Works.