York University PhD student Giovanni Hernández-Carranza (Department of Sociology) and undergraduate student Enzo Flores Montoya (Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics) were named the recipients of the 2020 Michael Baptista Essay Prize from the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC).
Hernández-Carranza won for his essay “Hemispheric Racial Formations: Making Sense of Central and South Americans’ Experience of Race and Ethnicity in Toronto, Canada,” and Flores Montoya for his paper “Lo fantasmagórico en Pedro Páramo y la metamorfosis en Silver: Una crítica marxista de la modernidad y del progreso” [“The phantasmagoric in Pedro Páramo and metamorphosis in Silver: A Marxist critique of modernity and progress”].
“Giovanni’s and Enzo’s work really shows the interdisciplinary strength and creativity happening in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at York,” said Ravi de Costa, associate dean, research and graduate studies, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.
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 a graduate and undergraduate student in recognition of an outstanding scholarly essay of relevance to Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the humanities, social science, business, or legal perspective.
The Michael Baptista Essay Prize and Michael Baptista 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 for and love of learning.
Essay entries were nominated by York University faculty members and evaluated by CERLAC’s Awards Committee. The prize-winning papers have been made available online as part of CERLAC’s Baptista Prize-Winning Essays Series. All nominated papers represent high-calibre scholarly work at their authors’ respective levels of study and merit recognition as worthy of candidacy for this prize.
York University faculty members who wish to nominate a student’s essay for this prize, should contact CERLAC at cerlac@yorku.ca or CERLAC’s Coordinator Camila Bonifaz at cbonifaz@yorku.ca.