Subventions (scroll down for prize info)

ASPHS is pleased to provide small subventions for regional and local meetings or workshops in the U.S. for activities related to our mission to promote the scholarly study of Spain and Portugal through History and related disciplines. The workshops need to be run by members of the ASPHS and funding preference will be given to those meetings that include more than one or two members of the ASPHS.

The deadline for submissions for the first of two funding cycles for the 2024-2025 academic year is November 30, 2024. The total funds available for disbursement will be $1500.

Members who wish to apply for subventions should prepare a proposal of no more than one page explaining the nature of the event and its connection to ASPHS’s mission. Proposals should be accompanied by a budget explaining how the requested funds will be expended. Please note that funding is intended to support workshops and symposia; it will not be granted to support individual travel, research, or in-class presentations by an invited speaker. Please send both the proposal and the budget to the members of the Board of Directors (board@asphs.net) on or before the deadline of each funding cycle. You must be a current member of ASPHS for your proposal to be considered.

Questions? Contact Association President Kirsten Schultz at president@asphs.net.

Prizes

The ASPHS offers four prizes for excellence in scholarship in Iberian history. To be eligible, authors must be current members of the ASPHS.

The Association Best… Prize is offered each year (with different categories in a three-year cycle), while the Kagan, Bishko, and Oliveira Marques prizes will be offered every other year. Calls for submissions are generally in the fall; prizes are awarded the following spring and announced at our annual conference. Each prize carries an honorarium of $250.

See the tabs below for information on each prize.

Best PrizeA.H. de Oliveira Marques PrizeBishko Memorial PrizeKagan PrizePast Prize Winners
PreviousNext

On a three-year rotation, the Association offers a prize for the best dissertation, the best early career article, and best first book. The 2025 prize honored the best first book, the 2026 prize will recognize the best dissertation, and the 2027 prize will go to the best early career article (in every case covering the previous three years). Submissions will only be accepted from those who are active members at the time of submission.

NOW ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS

The Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies invites submissions for the ASPHS Best Dissertation Prize. Doctoral dissertations in Iberian historical studies approved between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2024 are eligible. Submissions may be in English, Portuguese, or Spanish. The deadline is September 20, 2025.

Authors must be current members of the ASPHS. Information about membership is available on the ASPHS website: https://asphs.net/membership-overview/

The winner will be announced at the ASPHS Annual Meeting in Toronto in April 2026 and receive an honorarium of $250. Submissions may be sent to bestprize@asphs.net. Inquiries may be sent to president@asphs.net.

The ASPHS Best Dissertation Prize Committee:

Eugenia Afinoguénova, chair

Marquette University

Grace Coolidge

Grand Valley State University

Rachel Zimmerman

Colorado State University Pueblo

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.

In 2007 ASPHS held the first competition for the A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History. The prize was created by means of a generous endowment from Dr. Harold B. Johnson, of the University of Virginia, in memory of the distinguished Portuguese historian A. H. de Oliveira Marques (1933-2007). The prize is awarded every other year for the best peer-reviewed article or book chapter on Portuguese history published during the previous two years. Submissions will only be accepted from those who are active members at the time of submission.

2025 winner: Quintino Lopes, Francisco de Lacerda, and Ana Simões

Quintino Lopes, Francisco de Lacerda, and Ana Simões. “Armando de Lacerda and the Coimbra Phonetics Laboratory, 1930–1979: Cross-National Mobility and Exchange in a Global Context” Centaurus: Journal of the European Society for the History of Science 66.3 (2024): 319-350.

2023 winner: Nuno Castel-Branco

“Material Piety: Science and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century Portugal,” Renaissance Quarterly 74 (2021): 1162–1209.

Focusing on Jesuit mathematicians that taught in 17th-century Lisbon, the article shows how religious objects and devotion interacted directly with science. As stated by the author, “The careful study of these encounters between science and devotional practice contributes to long-lasting debates about science and religion and, more importantly, to broader inquiries into the very purpose of practicing science in the early modern period”.
Castel-Branco has combined a skillful analysis of source materials with a solid knowledge of secondary literature to produce an article of great originality. Well-structured and with a clear argument, the text artfully articulates history of science, material culture, and religious practices.

2021 winner: Laurinda Abreu

“Health care and the spread of medical knowledge in the Portuguese empire, particularly the Estado da India (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries),” Medical History 64:4 (2020): 449-446.

Initiated in 2003, the Bishko Prize honors Professor Charles Julian Bishko, the distinguished historian of medieval Iberia who taught for 39 years at the University of Virginia. The biennial prize recognizes the best peer-reviewed article or book chapter on medieval Iberian history published by a North American scholar.

Thanks to the prize committee:  Dr. Núria Jornet-Benito of the Universitat de Barcelona, Dr. Adam Franklin-Lyons of Emerson College, and Dr. Paola Tartakoff of Rutgers University.

2025 Bishko Award:  Yanay Israeli

Yanay Israeli, “Petition and response as social process: Royal power, justice and the people in late medieval Castile (c .1474–1504).” Past & Present, Volume 262, Issue 1, February 2024.

2023 Bishko Award:  Adam Franklin-Lyons and Marie A. Kelleher

“Framing Mediterranean Famine: Food Crisis in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona.” Speculum 97.1 (2022): 40-76.

The 2022-23 Bishko Memorial Prize winner was selected from a diverse pool of submissions that collectively demonstrate the extraordinary quality and sophistication of current scholarship within our field. “Framing Mediterranean Famine: Food Crisis in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona,” by Adam Franklin-Lyons and Marie A. Kelleher, is a clearly written, inspirational example of collaborative scholarship that integrates multiple lines of inquiry into a feast of interesting arguments. The article not only addresses the timely issue of climate change and its impact on food production but also exhibits how these systems were shaped by human agents engaging in localized decision-making. The result is a beautiful balance of archival and historiographical work that weaves together compelling stories about premodern Barcelona, wider Europe, and the Mediterranean that equip the authors to advance an impactful, multi-faceted argument about how their new models regarding the genesis of famines should encourage medievalists as well as historians studying other periods to reassess their methodologies. We, the members of the committee, are honored to award Kelleher and Franklin-Lyons this year’s Bishko Prize for this exceptionally brilliant and deeply deserving work of path-breaking scholarship.

2021 Bishko Awards: Jessica Boon and Dana Wessell Lightfoot & Alexandra Guerson

For this cycle the committee felt that there were two submissions equally deserving of the award:

Jessica Boon, “The Body-and-Soul in Pain: Medico-Theological Debates in Late Medieval Castilian Passion Treatises.” Viator 50.1 (2019): 249-87. DOI 10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.121363. (actual publication date Sept 2020)

Dana Wessell Lightfoot & Alexandra Guerson, “A Tale of Two Tolranas: Jewish women’s agency and conversion in late medieval Girona,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies​ 12.3 (2020): 344-364.

Established in 2023 and awarded every other year, the Richard L. Kagan Prize recognizes the best article or chapter in an edited collection on the history of the early modern Spanish world, c. 1500-c. 1800. The prize honors the contributions to this field by Richard Kagan, Academy Professor and Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor Emeritus of History at Johns Hopkins University. Submissions will only be accepted from those who are active members at the time of submission.

The next call for submissions will be in Fall 2026.

2025 Kagan Prize Winner:

Adam Jasienski, “Velázquez and the Fragile Portrait of the King,” Art History 44, n. 5 (Nov. 2021): 922-947.

The committee on the Richard L. Kagan Prize (A. Katie Harris (chair), Silvia Z. Mitchell, and Magdalena Sánchez) is pleased to name Adam Jasienski as the inaugural recipient for his article, “Velázquez and the Fragile Portrait of the King.” Jasienski examines Velázquez’s portrait of the sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés (c. 1635), a painting that depicts the artist in the act of modeling a bust of King Philip IV that Velázquez has left arrestingly unfinished and incomplete. Contextualizing the painting within Spanish court culture and early modern artistic practice, Jasienski convincingly makes the novel argument that the painting was intentionally left unfinished as a way of adhering to the complex and decorous conventions that governed the representation of Spanish royalty. This insight offers new perspectives on the larger body of Velázquez’s royal portraits, especially Las Meninas (1656), and on the early modern portraits of Spanish monarchs more generally. Well-argued and firmly anchored in both the primary and secondary literature, this article is also a pleasure to read, thanks to Jasienski’s lucid, readable style.

Best Early Career Article:
Gabriel de Aviles Rocha, Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor in History at Brown University, for “The Pinzones and the coup of the acedares: fishing and colonization in the fifteenth-century Atlantic.” Colonial Latin American Review 28:4 (2019), 427-449.

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize: 
Laurinda Abreu, “Health care and the spread of medical knowledge in the Portuguese empire, particularly the Estado da India (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries),” Medical History 64:4 (2020): 449-446.
 
Bishko Memorial Prize (joint winners):
Jessica Boon, “The Body-and-Soul in Pain: Medico-Theological Debates in Late Medieval Castilian Passion Treatises.” Viator 50.1 (2019): 249-87. DOI 10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.121363. (actual publication date Sept 2020)

Dana Wessell Lightfoot & Alexandra Guerson, “A Tale of Two Tolranas: Jewish women’s agency and conversion in late medieval Girona,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies​ 12.3 (2020): 344-364.

Best Dissertation:
Mónica García Fernández,“‘Dos en una sola carne’. Matrimonio, amor y sexualidad en el franquismo (1939-1975)” (Universidad de Oviedo, 2019)

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize: 
Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, “Women and the Acquisition, Transmission, and Execution of Public Offices in Early Modern Portugal,” Gender & History, vol. 31:2 (July 2019): 383-403.
 
Bishko Memorial Prize: 
Pamela A. Patton, “Demons and Diversity in León,” Medieval Encounters 25, no. 1-2 (2019): 150-179.

Best First Book Award
Daniel Hershenzon’s book, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

A. H. de Oliveira Marques Prize Winner
The 2019 winner was Márcia Gonçalves, “Of peasants and settlers: ideals of Portugueseness, imperial nationalism and European settlement in Africa, c. 1930-c.1945.” European Review of History: Revue européeane d’histoire 25, no 1: 166-186.

Bishko Memorial Prize Winner
The 2019 winner was Andrew Devereux, “Declared Enemies and Pacific Infidels: Spanish Doctrines of ‘Just War’ in the Mediterranean and Atlantic,” Republics of Letters 5, no. 3

Best Early Career Article
A tie between
Max Deardorff, “The Ties That Bind: Intermarriage between Moriscos and Old Christians in Early Modern Spain, 1526-1614,” Journal of Family History 2017, Vol. 42 (3) 250-270,
and
Edward Lawrence Holt, “Cantigas de Santa María, Cantigas de Cruzada: Reflections of Crusading Spirituality in Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María,” Al-Masāq, 27:3, 207-224.

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
Fabien Montcher,“Politics, Scholarship, and the Iberian Routes of the Republic of Letters: The Late Renaissance Itinerary of Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654),” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2 (2017) 182-225.

Biskho Prize
Abigail Agresta, “‘Unfortunate Jews’ and Urban Ugliness: Crafting a Narrative of the 1391 Assault on the jueria of Valencia,” Journal of Medieval History, 43, (2017), 320-41.

Best Dissertation
Alejandro Gomez del Moral, “Buying into Change: Consumer Culture and the Department Store in the Transformation(s) of Spain, 1939–1982” (History, Rutgers, 2014 ).  Honorable mention:  Vanesa Rodriguez-Galindo, “Ways of Being Modern in Madrid: Urban Change, Street Life, and Customs in Late Nineteenth-Century Print Culture” (History of Art, UNED, Madrid – Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, 2015)

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
Hugo Ribeira da Silva, ”Projecting Power: Cathedral Chapters and Public Rituals in Portugal, 1564-1650″, Renaissance Quarterly 69 (2016): 1369-400.

Biskho Prize
Adam Beaver, “Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions: Sephardic Legends’ Journey from Biblical Polemic to Humanist History” in After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, ed. Mercedes García Arenal, 21-65. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

Best First Book Thomas Barton, Contested Treasure: Jews and Authority in the Crown of Aragon (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014); honorable mention: Katrina Olds, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
Ricardo Roque, “Mimetic Governmentality and the Administration of Colonial Justice in East Timor, ca. 1860-1910,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2015) 57/1: 67-97.

Biskho Prize
Therese Martin, “Crouching Crossbowmen in Early Twelfth-Century Sculpture: A Nasty, Brutish, and Short(-Lived) Iconography,” Gesta 54:2 (Fall 2015): 143-164.

Best First Article
Belen Vicens, “Swearing by God: Muslim Oath-Taking in Late Medieval and Early Modern Christian Iberia,” published in Medieval Encounters in 2014.

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
Ana Isabel López-Salazar Codes, “Puderão mais os inquisidores que o rey. Las relaciones entre el Santo Oficio y la Corona en el Portugal de la Restauración (1640-1668)”, Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, vol. 39 (2014).

Bishko Prize
Glaire D. Anderson, “Sign of the Cross: Contexts for the Ivory Cross of San Millán de la Cogolla,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6:1 (Jan. 2014), 15-41

Best Dissertation
Fernando Vicente Albarrán, Los barrios negros: El Ensanche Sur en la formación del moderno Madrid (1860-1931)

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
Raphael Costa, “The ‘great façade of nationality’: some considerations on Portuguese tourism and the multiple meanings of Estado Novo Portugal in travel literature,” Journal of Tourism History v.5, n.1 (2013): 50-72.

Bishko Prize
Hussein Fancy, “Theologies of Violence: Recruitment of Muslim Soldiers by the Crown of Aragon,” Past & Present 221:1 (2013), 39-73.

Best First Book
James Matthews, Reluctant Warriors: Republican Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2012).

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
Liam Brockey, “Doubting Thomas: The Apostle and the Portuguese Empire in Early Modern Asia,” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, ed. Katherine Van Liere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Bishko Prize
Lucy K. Pick (University of Chicago), “Sacred Queens and Warrior Kings in the Royal Portraits of the Liber Testamentorum of Oviedo,” Viator 42 No. 2 (2011).

Best First Article
Michael J. Crawford, “Noble Status and Royal Duplicity in the Crown of Castile, 1454–1504,” European History Quarterly 41/4 (2011)

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Jews in the Diaspora with Sephared in the Mirror: ruptures, relations, and forms of identity: a theme examined through three cases,” Jewish History (2011) 25: 175-205.

Bishko Prize
Thomas W. Barton, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of San Diego, for his article “Muslims in Christian Countrysides: Reassessing Exaricus Tenures in the Crown of Aragon,” Medieval Encounters 17 (2011): 233-320.

Best Dissertation
Katrina Olds, “The ‘False Chronicles’ in Early Modern Spain: Forgery, Tradition, and the Invention of Texts and Relics (Princeton University, 2009)

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
Maria Eugenia Mata, “As Small Events May Have Large Long-Run Effects on Business Perspectives (Portugal, 1940s),” Problems And Perspectives In Management, Vol. 8, Issue 3 (June 2010), pp. 17-30.

Bishko Prize
Olivia Remie Constable, “Regulating Religious Noise: The Council of Vienne, the Mosque Call, and Muslim Pilgrimage in the Late Medieval Mediterranean World,” Medieval Encounters 16 (2010): 64-95.

Best First Book (tie)
Marta V. Vicente, Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Early Modern Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2006.

and

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
with honorable mention to Katie Harris. From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History
Alvaro S. Pereira, “The Opportunity of a Disaster: The Economic Impact of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake,” The Journal of Economic History 69:2 (2009): 466-499.

Bishko Prize
Brian Catlos, “The de Reys (1220-1501): The Evolution of a ‘Middle-Class’ Muslim Family in Christian Aragon” Viator 40 (2009): 197-219.

Best First Article (2006-2008)
Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics” American Historical Review 111:3 (2006): 660-690.

Bishko Prize
Jessica A. Boon, “The Agony of the Virgin: The Swoons and Crucifixion of Mary in Sixteenth Century Castilian Passion Treatises,” Sixteenth Century Studies 38:1 (2007): 3-26.

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History (tie)
Maria de Lurdes Rosa, “Santa Maria de Oliveira, demónios e reis: o uso de poder sagrado por um santuário medieval,” Boletim de Trabalhos Históricos 2007/08, pp. 135-153.

and

Tiago C.P. dos Reis Miranda, “António Freire de Andrade Encerrabodes (1699-1783): no espelho de Pombal,” Penélope. Número 30-31 (2004), pp. 93-134. [published in 2008]

Best Dissertation in Iberian History (2005-2007)
Gabriel Paquette, “Governance and Reform in the Spanish Atlantic World, c. 1760-1810” (University of Cambridge, 2006)

A.H. de Oliveira Marques Prize in Portuguese History Lorraine White, “Strategic Geography and the Spanish Habsburg Monarchy’s Failure to Recover Portugal, 1640-1668,” The Journal of Military History, 71 (April 2007), 373-409.

Best First Book Award (2004-2006)
Sasha David Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Bishko Prize
Katherine Elliot van Liere, “The Missionary and the Moorslayer: James the Apostle in Spanish Historiography from Isidore of Seville to Ambrosio de Morales,” Viator 37 (2006): 519-43

Best First Article Award (2003-2005)
Scott Taylor, “Credit, Debt, and Honor in Castile, 1600-1650,”  Journal of Early Modern History 7:1-2 (January 2003): 8-27

Bishko Prize
James D’Emilio, “The Royal Convent of Las Huelgas: Dynastic Politics, Religious Reform and Artistic Change in Medieval Castile”, in Meredith Parsons Lillich, ed., Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture VI  (Cistercian Nuns and their World) (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2005), 191-282

Best Dissertation in Iberian History
Amanda Wunder, “Search for Sanctity in Baroque Seville: The Canonization of San Fernando and the Making of Golden-Age Culture, 1624-1729” (Princeton University, 2002)

Bishko Prize
Richard P. Kinkade, “Beatrice ‘Contesson’ of Savoy (c. 1250-1290): The Mother of Juan Manuel,” in La Corónica 32.3 (2004), 163-226

Best First Book Award
David Coleman, Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-World Frontier City, 1492-1600 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003)

Bishko Prize
John Williams, “Meyer Schapiro in Silos: Pursuing the Iconography of Style,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003), 442-68

Best First Article Award
Gretchen Starr-Lebeau, “The Joyous History of Devotion and Memory of the Grandeur of Spain: The Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe and Religious and Political Memory,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History 93 (2002), pp. 238-262, and Barry Ross Mark, “Kabbalistic Tocinofobia: Américo Castro, Limpieza de Sangre, and the Inner Meaning of Jewish Dietary Laws,” in Fear and Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance , ed. Anne Scott and Cynthia Kosso. Turnhout [Belgium]: Brepols, 2002.

Best First Article
A. Katie Harris, “Forging History: the Plomos of Granada in Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza’s Historia eclesiástica,” Sixteenth Century Journal XXX/4 (1999): 945-966.