York faculty members who graded an exceptionally accomplished piece of student work, at the graduate or undergraduate level and relevant to Latin American and Caribbean studies, are encouraged to nominate the essay for the Michael Baptista Essay Prize. The essays should be from this past academic year and written from a humanities, social science, business or legal perspective.
The deadline to nominate essays for the prize is July 31. Nominations are limited to York University students only.
The prize includes a monetary component of $500 per awardee. Winning essays will be considered for publication by the Centre for Research on Latin America & the Caribbean at York University (CERLAC).
The essays may be from a full or half course during the 2012-2013 academic year, or a summer 2012 course. Major research papers at the graduate level may also be nominated. Submissions should be no longer than 35 double-spaced pages (exclusive of bibliography). Deadline extensions are available in instances where significant rewriting is required to shorten the work to within that limit.
To nominate:
Contact CERLAC at cerlac@yorku.ca and request a nomination form or download the form here
Submit the nominated paper and accompanying form to CERLAC no later than July 31. Both can be submitted electronically via e-mail to cerlac@yorku.ca. Hard copies are not required, but can be sent to: CERLAC, 8th Floor, York Research Tower.
Please note: Only faculty members can nominate a paper. Students may not self-nominate. Nonetheless, we encourage students who have received top grades and high praise on their papers to bring the existence of this prize to the attention of their instructors, so that they might nominate the paper if they so choose. A student may have only one essay entered into the competition in any given year (if more than one is nominated, the student will be asked to choose which is to be entered into the competition). Faculty members may nominate no more than one paper per level of study (max. two overall) in any given year. For the purposes of this award, an “undergraduate student” is a student enrolled in an undergraduate program who has received no prior postsecondary degree.
The papers submitted will be reviewed by two to three faculty readers with research interests in Latin America and the Caribbean. Both the prize winners and the nominating faculty members will be advised of the decision by approximately the end of September 2013.
These prizes are funded by the friends of Michael Baptista and the Royal Bank of Canada, where he was a senior vice-president until his untimely death.
For more information about the essay prize, visit the CERLAC website or contact CERLAC at at 416-736-5237 or cerlac@yorku.ca.
To read the essays of previous winners, click here.