Dissertation Prize
Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize
As a graduate student, Richmond Brown trained under Professor Ralph Lee Woodward Jr. at Tulane University. His areas of regional expertise were colonial Central America and the Spanish Southeast. His publications, among others, include Juan Fermín de Aycinena: Central American Entrepreneur, 1729-1796 (University of Oaklahoma Press, 1997), and Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the 18th Century (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
2024 Contest: We invite submissions for dissertations written on Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean, time frame of study is open. The dissertation itself must have been completed and defended between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2024.
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 a dissertation abstract.
Authors must be or become LACS members at the time of submission. See the membership page .
Deadline for submission: May 1, 2024.
Email submissions by MAY 1, 2024 to ALL of the following committee members:
Prof. Lupe Garcia, committee chair
Florida International University
guagarci@fiu.edu
Prof. Elizabeth O’Brien
University of California, Los Angeles
eobrien@history.ucla.edu
Prof. Eddie Brudney
University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
edward-brudney@utc.edu
Prof. Erica Johnson Edwards
Francis Marion University
ejohnson@fmarion.edu
2023 Winner: Michael Bailey, Boston College, "The First Irish Diaspora in the Age of the Bourbon Reforms: Imperial Translation, Political Economy, and Slavery"
Through a meticulous use of sources and a compellingly written narrative, Bailey’s long-term history of Irish diaspora argues persuasively for its broad impacts on Spain and Latin America. Outstanding archival research in multiple sites shows great use of documentation undergirding a scrutiny of well- and lesser-known agents of empire exploiting state craft and a “cosmopolitanism of exile” to negotiate between political powers and subjectivities at a pivotal moment of change for a vast Atlantic world. This work is a major contribution to literature on migration and offers new insight on the rise of slavery in Cuba and along the Gulf Coast. It weaves together intellectual and social histories and offers a sharp analysis of the political economy and institutional dimensions surrounding the transformation of the Spanish presence and power in the Americas. Bailey’s mastery of historical context is readily apparent as he unfolds a convincing case for Hiberno-Spanish influence on Latin American institutions and governance, offering a phenomenal view of the late-colonial era from the perspective of some influential players whose lives and work he explores masterfully. Already a valuable contribution across fields of research, this dissertation promises to be a well-received book.
2021 Winner:
Robert Franco, Duke University, "Revolution in the Sheets: The Politics of Sexuality and Tolerance in the Mexican Left, 1919-2001"
Robert Franco’s dissertation, “Revolution in the Sheets,” is a brilliant and wide-ranging look at an important topic: homosexuality and its discontents in the ideologies and cultures of Mexico’s leftist political parties. Spanning most of the twentieth century—from the Mexican Revolution, through the Cold War, and to the Zapatista movement and beyond—Franco demonstrates that leftist tolerance of homosexuality was “not only a political strategy for electoral gain, but also a method to maintain a masculinist party.” By claiming a politics of tolerance, leftist parties fronted solidarity with the sexual liberation movement, and to some degree, with women's and feminist movements as well. Yet, this solidarity was partial and incomplete, and it allowed them to avoid engaging seriously with those movements’ criticisms of heterosexism. As Franco convincingly argues, the Left's sexual politics were, as a whole, “structured around the preservation of masculine militancy.” The committee was enthralled with Franco’s lucid account, which linked histories of sexuality and women’s gender-based activism to the politics of governance across time, and without losing sight of his historical actor’s inner worlds and desires. In the absence of archival holdings on mid-to-late twentieth century queer activism in Mexico, the author made stunning use of oral history to create his own archives about sex and gender in twentieth century. With a cohesive and coherent throughline, accessible and crystal clear prose, excellent engagement with queer theory, and a well-organized structure, “Revolution in the Sheets” is a model for approaching intricate longue-duree histories with clarity and nuance. It is sure to be a landmark book in the history of twentieth century Mexico, for it shows that political hegemony is intimately entangled with sexual politics, and that we cannot understand one without the other.
Honorable Mention: Farren Yero, Duke University, “Laboratories of Consent: Vaccine Science in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1779-1840,”
Farren Yero’s dissertation, “Laboratories of Consent: Vaccine Science in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1779-1840,” offers a masterful account of the world's first smallpox vaccination campaign in the Americas. The vaccine represented colonial efforts to provide “health(care) rights” in the age of independence revolutions and broader rights-based agitation. Yet, colonial authorities relied on the bodies and labor of enslaved, indigenous, and other dispossessed people, who conserved the vaccine in their arms and transported it through time and space, allowing for the vaccination of others. In lively, readable, and sophisticated prose, Yero analyzes this history through the lenses of individual liberty, struggles over the abolition of slavery, parental rights, the fraught concept of medical consent in an unfree world, and the use of medical politics to preserve and legitimate colonial rule. Yero writes embodied histories of medical and colonial violence with sensitivity and grace, while astutely recognizing their relevance to our present moment. The committee was deeply impressed by Yero’s ambitious use of transnational, Atlantic-world methodologies and historiographies, and for how she bridged the colonial and modern periods in innovative ways. She also contributes to distinct but interlinked literatures, including the history of childhood, the history of disease, and the history of slavery. Finally, this work stands out for its serious engagement with interdiciplinary, feminist, Black and Latin Americanist theories about consent, subjectivity, and the body. “Laboratories of Consent” does not just take from these theories—it contributes to them, as well. The resulting book is sure to be a major contribution to the history of science, medicine, and the body in the global south and the Atlantic world.
2020 Winner: Elizabeth O’Brien, “Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940” (University of Texas, Austin)
This is a conceptually brilliant dissertation, backed up by excellent research. Covering a century and a half, O’Brien’s study explores caesarean surgery in theory, policy, and practice to shed new light on the enlightened religious origins of modern medical understandings of life in Mexico. Her research reveals that understandings about life and the role of surgery as a safeguard for life advanced in tandem with male practitioners’ increasing intervention in women’s reproduction, often with deadly effects. While sources examined are often written by male theorists and practitioners, O’Brien has uncovered evidence that also sheds light on women’s perspectives. Her meticulous examination of medical theses and clinic statistics complement her in-depth intellectual history of the caesarean, painting a frightening picture of the results of ideas and policies that privileged unborn life over maternal wellbeing. What makes O’Brien’s contribution stand out is how she links these processes together to argue for Mexico’s larger importance as a site of prior medical and religious “modernity.” The committee found the writing lively, transparent, and engaging throughout – a real model of writing accessible prose about complex, technical subjects.
Honorable Mention (2020): Edward Brudney, “Remaking Argentina: Labor, Law, and Citizenship during the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional” (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Brudney’s dissertation significantly revised our understanding of the era of Argentine military dictatorship, which is too often portrayed as a dramatic divergence from what came before and after it – or what Brudney calls the “authoritarian exceptionalism” of the military regime. By looking beyond the violence and disappearances, which have rightly occupied much historiographical attention, Brudney turns to the quotidian ways that the regime sought to restructure law, governance, and citizenship. He argues that the dictatorship was marked by deep continuities with previous regimes and the persistence of the rule of law, despite outward appearances. Brudney’s point is not that the Argentina of the PRN was indeed not that bad; rather, he shows us how to take seriously the ‘reorganize’ and ‘process’ in its name: the everyday legality and functionality that (disquietingly) connects how unions and corporations function under both democratic and non-democratic rule.
Past Winners
2018 Winner: Jesse Zarley’s, “Towards A Transandean Mapuche Politics: Ritual and Power in Chile and Argentina, 1792-1834,” University of Maryland.
2018 Honorable Mention: Adolfo Polo y la Borda, “Cosmopolitanism, Mobility, and Royal Officials in the Making of the Spanish Empire (1580-1700),” University of Maryland.
2017 Winner: Corinna Zeltsman, Duke University, “Ink Under the Fingernails: Making Print in Nineteenth-Century Mexico City,” (2016)
2017 Honorable Mention: Christopher Heaney’s (University of Texas at Austin), “The Pre-Columbian Exchange: The Circulation of the Ancient Peruvian Dead in the Americas and Atlantic World.” (2016)
2016: Winner: Mary Ellen Hicks, University of Virginia, "The Sea and the Shackle: African and Creole Mariners and the Making of a Luso-African Atlantic Commercial Culture, 1721-1835."
2015 Winner: Courtney Jeanette Campbell, Vanderbilt University. "The Brazilian Northeast, Inside Out: Region, Nation, and Globalization (1928-1968)
2014: Tore C. Olsson, University of Georgia, 2013, "Agrarian Crossings: The American South, Mexico, and the Twentieth-Century Remaking of the Rural World"
Honorable Mention: Cameron Strang, "Entangled Knowledge, Expanding Nation: Science and the United States Empires in the Southeast Borderlands, 1783-1842"
2013: Julia Gaffield, Duke University, 2012 "'So Many Schemes in Agitation': The Haitian State and the Atlantic World"