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.
2022
Heather Flynn Roller, Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (Stanford Univ. Press)
2021
Larissa Brewer-García, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2020
Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard Univ. Press)
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)
2022 Katz Prize
Heather Flynn Roller, Colgate University
Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (Stanford Univ. Press)
Engagingly written and sharply argued, Contact Strategies reveals how the Mura and the Guaikurú of the colonial Amazon dictated the terms, timetable, and manner of their encounter with Europeans. By juxtaposing documentary silences with close readings of scant archival sources as well as incorporating critical ethnographic evidence, Heather F. Roller dynamically demonstrates how Indigenous people creatively adapted technologies, judicially acquired knowledge, and capably crossed borders based on their own desires, needs, and politics.