Peter Chesney

Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow

Peter Sebastian Chesney, Ph.D., won the Norris Hundley Dissertation Prize in 2021 for his work at UCLA’s history department. His dissertation was entitled Drive Time: A Sensory History of Car Cultures in Los Angeles. This project, which he has been solicited to expand into a book manuscript, retells the story of automobility in the 20th-century U.S. city through the lens of the five senses. As it turns out, these multisensory perspectives allow for the conventional view of L.A. as a car culture to melt away in favor of the car cultures. There was no one way of identifying as a driver there. At the point of intersectionality between the motorist’s mode of mobility and other categories of social difference erupted all sorts of ethnogeneses. These included a prewar car culture of youths at the cusp of adulthood, a postwar Gay men’s car culture, and a crip car culture of placard-wielding people with disabilities.

Besides working on his book and publications for an academic audience, Peter is active in public history circles. He’s been featured in a short documentary for Invitation au voyage on European Union television, sat for a long-form interview with Protean magazine, and moderated panels for the 2025 L.A. on Wheels event at the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County. He’s curated for the Hunger Museum and Vanderbilt University Museum of Art’s spring 2026 Scent exhibition. His policy writing commissioned by UCLA and the City of Los Angeles has intervened in national and international debates about congestion pricing, rent stabilization, and statewide residential upzoning in California. Next spring, he’s advising three Buchanan Fellows and shooting a short documentary about Morris Frank, the late 1920s Vanderbilt student who was expelled for going blind. He founded The Seeing Eye in 1929. Like Frank, Peter too has a sensory impairment. He is Half Deaf (total hearing loss in his left ear, the one with the earring). Please excuse his awkwardness.