Friedrich Katz Prize Recipients
The Friedrich Katz Prize is awarded annually to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America, including the Caribbean. Awarded for the first time in 2014, the prize honors honors Friedrich Katz, an Austrian-born specialist in Latin American history, whose nearly 50-year career inspired dozens of students and colleagues in the field.
2019
Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Harvard Univ. Press)
2018
Lisa Sousa, The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico (Stanford Univ. Press)
2017
Jane Mangan, Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain (Oxford Univ. Press)
2016
Edward Beatty, Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico (Univ. of California Press)
2015
Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2014
Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2019 Katz Prize
Michel Gobat, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Harvard Univ. Press)
Michel Gobat’s beautifully written history of Walker’s project in Nicaragua offers an insightful and timely reframing of US imperialism in Latin America as intricately connected to hemispheric conversations about race and democratic ideals. The book’s empirical depth, persuasive argumentation, and theoretical underpinnings testify to the potential of combining a commitment to archival research with a devotion to clear prose.