Bradley Skopyk, who earned his PhD from the Graduate History Program in December 2010, has won the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Outstanding Dissertation Prize for 2012! Dr. Skopyk’s dissertation, “Undercurrents of Conquest: The Shifting Terrain of Indigenous Agriculture in Colonial Tlaxcala, Mexico,” was supervised by the late Elinor Melville and Richard Hoffmann. The prize committee members were impressed by “the scope of the dissertation, which covers more than three hundred years of colonial history and is based on extensive research on unpublished sources in both Náhuatl and Spanish. [Dr. Skopyk’s] remarkable command of primary sources is combined with a deep grasp of theoretical literature in a wide range of fields, including history, environmental studies, demographics, and political economy. The result is a unique and original scholarly work, a model of interdisciplinary research that makes a number of relevant contributions to the history of colonial Mexico and Latin America and that has significant comparative Value for other regions of the world and historical periods.” You may recall that Dr. Skopyk also won the 2012 American Society for Environmental Studies Rachel Carson Prize for the best dissertation in environmental history earlier this year.
