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 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). Calls for submissions are generally in the fall; prizes are awarded the following spring and announced at our annual conference. Submissions will only be accepted from those who are active members at the time of submission. The prize carries an honorarium of $250.
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.
