2019 Prizes and Awards

Arthur P. Whitaker Prize

MACLAS honored Dr. Jennifer Jolly (Professor of Art History, Ithaca College) at the annual conference in March 2019 with the Arthur P. Whitaker Prize, awarded each year for the best book published in the previous two years by a member of MACLAS. Her book is titled Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas (Univ. of Texas Press 2018). Her essays on David Alfaro Siqueiros and Josep Renau have been published in edited volumes and in the Oxford Art Journal.

Dr.Jolly teaches Latin American and Pre-Columbian art history at Ithaca College, N.Y. and holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. At I.C., she is a former co-coordinator for the Latin American Studies minor program. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, as well as two Fulbright-García Robles fellowships.

The MACLAS Whitaker Prize Committee noted: "Professor Jolly's book offers a fresh, innovative, creative, and highly original treatment of a wide range of intertwined issues relating to state formation, nation-building, identity and community formation, transnational cultural relations, and cultural production relating especially to tourism and the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. Emphasizing national and transnational actors as well as local agency, Jolly’s book offers a rich, insightful, compelling narrative and analysis of an important set questions that scholars have only begun to explore. Meticulously researched and elegantly written – and, for a book on cultural history, blessedly free of jargon – Jolly’s examination of the ways that art and tourism “functioned together as a technology of nation-building” (p. 4) under President Lázaro Cárdenas not only advances our understanding of this specific episode in post-Revolutionary Mexican history. Her study also has many comparative implications that promise to push the literature in new and fruitful directions. For these reasons we are delighted to award the 2019 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize to Professor Jennifer Jolly of Ithaca College."

Dr. Jolly has been invited to be the Keynote Speaker at the 2020 MACLAS Conference, which will take place at Salisbury University in Maryland. 

The deadline for the 2020 Whitaker Prize submissions is January 13th, 2020. Please send submissions to Chair of Whitaker Prize Committee), TBA in Fall newsletter.

Davis Prize

The 2019 Davis Prize was awarded to Christina Baker of the University of Daytonfor her article “Sounds of a Modern Nation: From Narcocorridos to Hugo Salcedo’s Música de balas,” published in Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literature (2017). Baker weaves insights from literary analysis, theater studies, and ethnomusicology to provide a rich perspective on the experience of living in contexts of persistent violence. In this discussion of Mexico, Bakers considers the likelihood of experiencing direct or indirect traumatic events through actual existential threat or through the exposure to a particular “soundscape” which includes the sounds of heavy boots stomping on sidewalks, the sounds of guns cocking, kickback, and bullets entering bodies, and the sounds of the narcocorridos. Sounds of a Modern Nation contributes to an emerging field that looks at the connectedness of sound culture and social conflict, and enriches the study of nation and culture by considering modern nations as defined by particular soundscapes. 

The Davis Prize is awarded each year for best book chapter or article published in the previous two years by a member in good standing for the past two years. To apply, please send to Ana Moraña, (Chair of Davis Prize Committee) @ AnMora@ship.edu by January 13th, 2020.