Awards, Fellowships & Prizes: Conference on Latin American History

As announced at its annual luncheon on January 3, 2009 in New York, the Conference on Latin American History recognized the superb achievement of the following scholars:

The Bolton-Johnson Prize (For best book in English on any significant aspect of Latin American History [$1,000 award]):

Cynthia E. Milton, The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistantce in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Honorable Mention: Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Duke University Press, 2008).

The Conference on Latin America History Prize (For most distinguished article published other than in HAHR or The Americas [$200 award]):

Brian Delay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War,” American Historical Review 112:1 (February, 2008): 35–68.

The Lewis Hanke Prize (Supports transformation of dissertation into book [$1,000 award]):

M. Kittiya Lee, “Conversing in Colony: The Brasilica and the Vulgar in Portuguese America, 1500–1759”

The Tibesar Prize (For most distinguished article in The Americas [$200 award]):

David Garret, “‘In Spite of Her Sex:’ The Cacica and the Politics of the Pueblo in Late Colonial Cusco,” The Americas 64:4 (April, 2008): 547–581.

The Lydia Cabrera Award for Cuban Historical Studies (Supports study of Cuba between 1492 and 1868 [$5,000 award]):

Rachel Hynson (University of Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Politicians, Physicians, and Psychopaths: Public Responses to Insanity in Cuba, 1854–1868,” budget: $5,350

Elinor Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History (Established in 2007 through a bequest from Elinor Kerr Melville. It is conferred annually for the best book in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese on Latin American Environmental History [$500 award]):

Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

The James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize (For most distinguished article in Hispanic American Historical Review [$200 award]):

Mark Morris, “The Nahuatl Counterinsurgency Propaganda of 1810: Windows to the Linguistic Side of Colonial Rule,” HAHR 87:3 (August 2007).

Honorable Mention: Jeremy Ravi Mumford, “Litigation as Ethnography in Sixteenth-Century Peru: Polo de Ondegardo and the Mitimaes,” HAHR 88:1 (February 2008).

The James R. Scobie Memorial Award (Supports an exploratory research trip abroad to determine the feasibility of a Ph.D. dissertation topic dealing with some facet of Latin American History [$1,000 award]):

Matthew Scalena (SUNY, Stony Brook), “Illicit Nation: Panamanian State Formation, U.S. Empire, and Illegality across the Isthmus”

Rafaela Acevedo-Field (University of California, Santa Barbara), “The Unsettling Presence of Conversos in Seventeenth Century New Spain”

Grace Sanders (Michigan University), “Blurred Battles: Haitian Women’s National and Transnational Activism, 1940–1990s”

Theodore Cohen (University of Maryland), “Translating Race, Articulating Culture: The Intellectual Construction of Blackness in Mexican Identity, 1916–1972”

Honorable Mention: Mark Christensen (Penn State University), “Spelling Out Salvation: Nahuatl and Maya Ecclesiastical Texts and the Construction of Diverse Religious Discourses”

Honorable Mention: Tatiana Giovanelli Gottlieb (Brown University), “Not Maids like Before: Domestic Service and the Dialectics of Intimacy in Rio de Janeiro, 1870–1940”

Distinguished Service Award (Conferred annually upon a person whose career in scholarship, teaching, publishing, librarianship, institutional development, or other fields demonstrates significant contributions to the advancement of the study of Latin American History in the United States [$500 award and a plaque suitably inscribed]):

Asunción Lavrin (Arizona State University)