The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation explores automotive heritage, its place in society, and the ways we might preserve and conserve it.
Drawing on contributions from academics and practitioners around the world and comprising six sections, this volume carries the heritage discourse forward by exploring the complex and sometimes intricate place of automobiles within society. Taken as a whole, this book helps to shape how we think about automobile heritage and considers how that heritage explores a range of cultural, intellectual, emotional, and material elements well outside of the automobile body itself. Most importantly, perhaps, it questions how we might better acknowledge the importance of automotive heritage now and in the future.
The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation is unique in that it juxtaposes theory with practice, academic approaches with practical experience, and recognizes that issues of preservation and conservation belong in a broad context. As such, this volume should be essential reading for both academics and practitioners with an interest in automobiles, cultural heritage, and preservation.
About the Author: Barry L. Stiefel is an associate professor in the Historic Preservation and Community Planning program at the College of Charleston. He is interested in how the sum of local preservation efforts affects regional, national, and multinational policies as well as preservation education. Recently, he has taken an interest in automobiles as a metaphor for rethinking the way we approach the preservation of the built environment. Dr. Stiefel has published numerous books and articles. Originally from southeastern Michigan, where the automobile industry was key to the region's identity, Dr. Stiefel now resides with his family in South Carolina, where his primary mode of transportation is a bicycle.
Jennifer Clark is the head of the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her research areas in automobility include motor museums, roadside memorials, and the motoring life. She is the editor of Safe and Mobile (1999), the author of Aborigines and Activism (2008) and The American Idea of England, 1776-1840 (2013), and the editor, with Adele Nye, of Teaching the Discipline of History in an Age of Standards (2018). She is currently researching social histories of Holden.
