2016 Michael Baptista Essay Prizes Awarded
The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University is pleased to announce the winners of the 2016 Michael Baptista Essay Prize for outstanding scholarly papers on topics of relevance to the area of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
At the undergraduate level, the prize was awarded to: Elise Dueck for the paper The La Platosa Conflict. At this level we also had an honorable mention, Camila Varela Acosta for the paper ‘Decolonizing the Nation-State’: Indigenous Autonomy, Extractivism, and Consultation in Contemporary Bolivia.
At the graduate level, the prize was awarded to Alyssa James for the paper Ambivalent Resistance. Gender, Mobility, and Haiti’s Itinerant Market Women and to Josh Mentanko for the paper “The Fluttering Gait and the Power Puff are Unheard of here”: Gay Travel to Revolutionary Mexico. At this level we also had an honorable mention, Ciann Wilson, for the paper Beyond the Colonial Divide: African Diasporic and Indigenous Youth Alliance Building for HIV Prevention.
The essays were nominated by York faculty members and evaluated by two committees of CERLAC Fellows (a separate committee for each level of prize). All three of these prize-winning papers are available online as part of CERLAC's Baptista Prize-Winning Essays Series. All of the nominated papers represent high-calibre scholarly work at their authors' respective levels of study and merit recognition as worthy of candidacy for this prize.
The Michael Baptista Essay Prize was established by the friends of Michael Baptista and the Royal Bank of Canada. This $500 Prize is awarded annually to both a graduate and an undergraduate student at York University in recognition of an outstanding scholarly essay of relevance to the area of Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the humanities, social science, business or legal perspective. The Michael Baptista Essay Prize and Lecture are named in honour of Michael Baptista in recognition of the areas central to his spirit and success: the importance of his Guyanese / Caribbean roots, his dedication to and outstanding achievement at the Royal Bank of Canada, and his continued and unqualified drive and love of learning.
If you are a York faculty member and wish to nominate a student's essay for this prize, please contact CERLAC: cerlac@yorku.ca
Congratulations to all of this year's nominees and to the three 2016 Baptista Prize winners!