Kimberly S. Hanger Article Prize
Prize & Winners
Professor Kimberly Hanger was a historian of Louisiana’s Spanish colonial period, and author of, among other publications, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places (Duke, [1997] 2002).
2024 Competition: We invite submissions for articles published on Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean, time frame of study is open. The article itself must have been published between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023.
Criteria for selection include: quality and originality of research, new and stimulating interpretations and writing quality.
Please include a cover letter with the name of the author, institutional affiliation, and an article abstract.
Authors must be or become LACS members at the time of submission. See the membership page .
Deadline: May 1, 2024
Email submissions by May 1, 2024 to ALL of the following committee members::
Prof. David Carey, committee chairr
Loyola University Maryland
drcarey@loyola.edu
Prof. Jaclyn Sumner
Presbyterian College
jasumner@presby.edu
Prof. Shawn Austin
University of Arkansas
saustin1@uark.edu
Prof. Erica Johnson Edwards
Francis Marion University
ejohnson@fmarion.edu
2023 Winner: Oscar de la Torre, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, “The Well That Wept Blood: Ghostlore, Haunted Waterscapes, and the Politics of Quilombo Blackness in Amazonia (Brazil),” The American Historical Review 127:4 (December 2022)
Oscar de la Torre's article " “The Well That Wept Blood: Ghostlore, Haunted Waterscapes, and the Politics of Quilombo Blackness in Amazonia (Brazil),” published i n The American Historical Review , details an oral myth about an old sugar plantation well that weeps blood because it was a disposal site for enslaved bodies. The well, de la Torre argues, shows that haunted waterscapes p rovide opportunities to understand Afro-Amazonian history/identity and the traumas of conquest and violence . In doing so, he ties together African, Amazonian, and Portuguese ideas about life and death and the legacies of slavery in the region . The article is both c onceptually sophisticated a nd accessible , an impressive feat.
2022 Winner: Karen B. Graubart, "Pesa más la libertad: Slavery, Legal Claims, and the History of Afro-Latin American Ideas," William and Mary Quarterly 78:3 (July 2021).
Graubart deftly analyzes a series of petitions launched by enslaved Africans contesting mistreatment in Lima’s obrajes to uncover “limited antislavery arguments” that circulated in the city’s “subaltern intellectual space[s]” during the seventeenth century. Her article musters an impressive body of scholarship including social and labor histories of Lima, the legal history of the Spanish Empire, and the history of slavery to contextualize the case study. This robust context helps illuminate the petitioners’ arguments and strategies, revealing their conversance with legal, theological, and administrative justifications for slavery and their own contributions to imperial debates contesting illegal enslavement. A particular strength of the article is the way it sheds light not only on the anti-slavery intellectual currents that circulated among enslaved communities, but also on how individuals of African descent developed their critique and negotiated their status vis-a-vis Lima’s multiracial societies and politicoracial hierarchies.
2021 Winner: Winner: Ana María Silva Campo, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, “Through the Gate of the Media Luna: Slavery and the Geographies of Legal Status in Colonial Cartagena de Indias.” Hispanic American Historical Review 100:3
Silva Campo’s work offers a compelling history of the layered vulnerabilities of maroon communities. More than a narrative about the dangers of imminent destruction or prolonged violence, Silva Campo’s article highlights the legal maneuverings of Spaniards who claimed “ancestral” slave ownership, arguing that even the grandchildren of maroons of their own forebearers could be enslaved. Well-researched and accessibly written for the field as well as undergraduates, Silva Campo’s scholarship also provides a macro and micro level examination of how the Spanish colonial administration considered the status of maroons and how palenque residents (through mediated interrogations) understood they themselves and their modes of survival.
Honorable Mention: David Carey Jr., Loyola University Maryland, “Rethinking Representation and Periodization in Guatemala's Democratic Experiment,” Out of the Shadow: Revisiting Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala, ed. Julie Gibbings and Heather Vrana. Austin: University of Texas Press
2020 Winner: Natalia Milanesio, "Sex and Democracy: The Meanings of the Destape in Postdictatorial Argentina," Hispanic American Historical Review 99:1 (Febuary 2019)
The Kimberly Hanger Article Prize committee is happy to select "Sex and Democracy: The Meanings of the Destape in Postdictatorial Argentina"by Natalia Milanesio, published in the Hispanic American Historical Review 99, no. 1 (February 2019). Milanesio's article analyzes the explosive popularity of sexual images and narratives in the culture moment that marked the Argentina's transition away from military rule during the 1980s. The article is an engaging, and even fun read that demonstrates the promise of using novel evidence and methodology to take the lid off, uncover, expose the consequential and fraught relationship between authoritarianism, censorship, and popular attitudes towards sex.
Past Winners
2019 Winner: Danielle Terrazas, “‘My Conscience is Free and Clear’: African-Descended Women, Status, and Slave Owning in Mid-Colonial Mexico,” The Americas (July 2018).
2018 Winner: Marc Hertzman, “Fatal Differences: Suicide, Race, and Forced Labor in the Americas,” American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 2, April 2017, Pages 317–345
2018 Honorable Mention: Sasha Turner, “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 38:2 (2017): 232-250.
2017 Winner: Marjoleine Kars, “Dodging Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763,” American Historical Review 121:1 (2016): 39-69.
2017 Honorable Mention: José Ponce-Vázquez, “Unequal Partners in Crime: Masters, Slaves, and Free People of Color in Santo Domingo, c.1600–1650,” Slavery & Abolition 37:4 (2016): 704-723.
2016 Winner: Zeb Tortorici, “Sexual Violence, Predatory Masculinity, and Medical Testimony in New Spain,” Osiris 30:1 (2015): 272-294.
2015 Winner: Bianco Premo's, "Felipa's Braid: Women, Culture, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca," Ethnohistory 61:3 (2014): 497-523.
Honorable mention: Eva Maria Mehl's,"Mexican Recruits and Vagrants in Late-Eighteenth-Century Philippines: Empire, Social Order, and Bourbon Reforms in the Spanish Pacific World," Hispanic American Historical Review 94:4 (2014): 547-79.
2014: Celso Thomas Castilho, Vanderbilt Univerity, “Performing Abolitionism, Enacting Citizenship: The Social Construction of Political Rights in 1880s Recife, Brazil” Hispanic American Historical Review (2013) 93 (3): 377-409
2013: Matt O'Hara "The Supple Whip: Innovation and Tradition in Mexican Catholicism," American Historical Review (2012) 117 (5): 1373-1401
2012: Juliana Barr, University of Florida. "Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the 'Borderlands' of the Early Southwest," William and Mary Quarterly, 68:1 (January 2011): 5-46
2011: Christina Bueno, Northeastern Illinois University."Forjando Patrimonio: The Making of Archaeological Patrimony in Porfirian Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 90:2 (May 2010), 215-245.
2010: Betsy Konefal, College of William and Mary. "Subverting Authenticity: Reinas Indígenas and the Guatemalan State, 1978," Hispanic American Historical Review, 89:1 (February 2009): 41-72.
2009: David Carey. "'Oficios de su raza y sexo' (Occupations Consistent with Her Race and Sex): Mayan Women and Expanding Gender Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Guatemala." Journal of Women's History vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 114-48.
2008: Ida Altman, University of Florida, "The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America," The Americas, 63:4 (2007): 587-614.
2006: Paulo Drinot, University of Oxford. "Madness, Neurasthenia, and "Modernity": Medico-Legal and Popular Interpretations of Suicide in Early Twentieth-Century Lima," Latin American Research Review - Volume 39, Number 2, 2004, pp. 89-113.
2004: María Elana Martínez, UCLA. "The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico," William and Mary Quarterly, July 2004.
2002: Hal Langfur, "Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in Late-Colonial Brazil," Hispanic American Historical Review 82:2 (May 2002): 215-56.