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.
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)
2021 Katz Prize
Larissa Brewer-García, University of Chicago
Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge Univ. Press)
An astonishing achievement of historical excavation and analysis, Beyond Babel reveals how acts of religious translation functioned as origin sites for the creation of new discourses of Blackness and Black subjectivity among Afro-Latin Americans. Gorgeously written and subtly argued, Larissa Brewer-García demonstrates how Black translators shaped notions of beautiful and virtuous Blackness to elevate prominent as well as previously neglected texts to new authoritative heights of intellectual and literary consequence.