Best… Prize
On a three-year rotation, the Association offers a prize for the best dissertation, the best early career article, and best first book. The 2027 prize will go to the best early career article or book chapter (in every case covering the previous three years). Articles or book shapters published since January 2024 will be considered for the 2027 prize. Submissions will only be accepted from those who are active members at the time of submission. The prize carries an honorarium of $250. Please email each judge to be considered for this prize by the deadline of November 1, 2026. The committee this year is Chair, Eugenia Afinoguenova, Marquette University (eugenia.afinoguenova@marquette.edu), Ben Ehlers, University of Georgia (behlers@uga.edu) and Susan Martin Márquez, Rutgers University (susanmm@rutgers.edu)
2026 Prize: Best Dissertation
Committee:
Eugenia Afinoguénova (Chair), Grace Coolidge, Rachel Zimmerman
Winner:
Alba Zarza Arribas, “Pasajes arquitectónicos. La vivienda en el cine de Estado de España y Portugal (1938-1975).” Universidad de Valladolid, Dept. of Theory of Architecture and Architectural Projects, 2023.
This dissertation bridges town and country by comparing and contrasting the functions of architectural landmarks as well as often overlooked vernacular architecture in newsreels produced during the 20th-century dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. It demonstrates how filmic projection reinforced or undermined the dictators’ claims to power over lived and built environments. Zarza Arribas’s meticulous research crosses countries and languages and brings together the methodologies of history, film studies, and architectural history to introduce new sources into the historical analysis of twentieth-century dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. The Committee was impressed by the breadth and depth of this richly illustrated and beautifully constructed work.
Honorable mentions:
Henry David Adam Brown, “Antifascist Army: Military Culture and Military Identity in the Popular Army during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).” University of Kent, School of History, 2024.
The Spanish Civil War is a well-researched field, yet the author’s solid grounding in military cultural history makes this a genuinely new contribution, supported by impressive archival research that recovers soldiers’ voices from their letters and frontline newspapers.
Patricia Manzano Rodríguez, “Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo: authorship, canonicity, and originality in the workshop of Velázquez.” University of Durham, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, 2023.
Reaching beyond traditional art history, this beautifully written, fundamental study combines new insights into the artistic biographies of both Mazo and Velázquez with a catalogue of Mazo’s works. It reconsiders the meaning of authorship in early modern artistic production, enriches cultural analysis by bringing minor artists into focus, and offers fresh insight into canonicity.
2025 Prize: Best First Book
Winner:
Ran Segev, Sacred Habitat: Nature and Catholicism in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic (Penn State Press, 2023).
Honorable Mentions:
Fabien Montcher. Mercenaries of Knowledge: Vicente Nogueira, the Republic of Letters, and the Making of Late Renaissance Politics (Cambridge UP, 2023).
Samuël Coghe. Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge UP, 2022); Portuguese translation: Políticas de População nos Trópicos Demografia, Saúde e Transimperialismo na Angola Colonial(Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2024).
2024 Prize: Best Early Career Article
Ana Mafalda Lopes, “The Invisibility of Portuguese Stepfamilies,” Journal the History of the Family, 2022.
The product of extensive and laudable archival spade work, Ana Mafalda Lopes’s article deftly demonstrates the gendered ways in which second marriage unions and stepparent-child relationships held far-reaching consequences for the intergenerational transfer of wealth in early modern Portugal. The author’s particular attention to the legal agency of widows, widowers, and stepchildren in fluid family formations overturns folk stereotypes of wicked stepmothers and shows the diversity of economic and social relationships in which legal and extra-legal stepfamilies could participate. Not only is this article the product of deep archival research, but it uses empirical findings to shed new light on shifts in legislation and ideas enshrined in legal doctrines concerning early modern inheritance. This methodological dexterity makes the article an important contribution to the social, political, and legal history of the early modern Iberian family, and for scholars more broadly seeking to make visible the critical interpersonal relationships that are underrepresented in the archives. The committee (Gabriel Rocha, chair, Max Deardorff, and Gretchen Starr-LeBeau) especially valued the ways in which Lopes highlights continuities and discontinuities between Portuguese, Spanish, and other European historiographies, leading to conclusions that suggest further pathways of research into stepfamilies in the global settings of the Portuguese empire.
2023 Prize: Best Dissertation
The Best Dissertation prize was awarded to Yonatan Glazer-Eytan for “Transgressing the Sacred: The Crime and Cult of Sacrilege in the Spanish Catholic Monarchy, 1558-1632” (PhD Johns Hopkins).
2022 Prize: Best First Book
The 2022 Best First Book winner was S. Elizabeth Penry, for The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
The Committee also agreed to name a title for an honorable mention: Claire Gilbert, In Good Faith: Arabic Translation and Translators in Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
