CLAS Affiliate Evelyn Saavedra Autry Wins 2026 Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award
CLAS affiliate Evelyn Saavedra Autry won the Meridians Journal's Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award for her article "Insurgent Memories of Armed Struggle: Self-representation by Female ex-Combatants in Peru," published in Vol. 24, No. 1. This award honors an author whose work embodies the groundbreaking nature and innovative spirit of Paula’s writing.
Evelyn Saavedra Autry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her scholarship bridges multiple fields of knowledge, centering Indigenous epistemologies in dialogue with decolonial and feminist pedagogies, literary and cultural studies, and feminist theory. Her current book project, Archives of Coloniality and Indigenous Resurgence: Race, Gender, and Violence in Narratives of the Andes (under contract with University of North Carolina Press; forthcoming Fall 2027), offers a sweeping, multidisciplinary study of Andean Indigenous women’s cultural representations from the colonial period to the present.
You can find her article here.
Congratulations, Evelyn!
New CLAS Working Group: Borders and In/Securities in the New Americas
The CLAS is pleased to announce a new student working group organized by anthropology grad student Clive Echagüe!
The CLAS student Working Group "Borders and In/Securities in the New Americas" brings together scholars and graduate students to discuss current border and migration issues across the hemisphere. It focuses on how new policies of deportation, anti-immigrant sentiment, externalized borders, migrant detention, and militarization are reshaping migration and the everyday lives of people in borderlands and migrant corridors across the Americas. The group creates a space for dialogue, collaboration, and research by asking questions about how security rhetoric overlaps with everyday insecurities and about the kinds of resistance and agency that migrants and border residents develop in response.
Join this group!
More information here
Clio Isaacson presents at the Conference on Latin American History
PhD candidate in History Clio Isaacson presented a conference paper at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), held in January in Chicago.
As part of the panel “Women, Bodies, and Social Control,” Clio’s presentation examined portrayals of elite Spanish women in seventeenth-century Nahuatl-language histories. Her paper argued that colonial Nahua writers transferred ideas about the historical authority of elite Nahua women to Spanish queens, nuns, and virreinas. These women were depicted as holding authority comparable to pre-Hispanic Nahua noblewomen and were used to make political points, much as elite Nahua women functioned as key political symbols in narratives of the pre-Hispanic past. Notably, these portrayals bore little resemblance to how Nahua writers described Spanish women they actually interacted with, who were not treated with the same reverence.
Clio's dissertation is entitled “Women of the Nahuatl Annals: Writing the Lives of Women in Late Pre-Hispanic and Early Colonial Mexico.” It deals with how colonial Nahua writers who wrote Nahuatl-language histories using the newly-introduced Latin alphabet included women in their telling of the past. By moving beyond sources created either by Spaniards or by Nahuas working under Spanish instruction, it provides a more complex depiction of how Nahua women were perceived in their own communities, particularly in relation to male-dominated areas like politics and war.
Congratulations, Clio!
History Graduate Student Publishes Article on Bullfighting in Colombia
Javier González, a PhD student in History, has published an analytical article on bullfighting in the city of Madrid, Colombia, in the newspaper El Espectador.
The article, co-authored with Sandra Rojas, a university professor specializing in animal ethics, examines contemporary debates surrounding bullfighting and its ethical, cultural, and social implications.
Javier is a doctoral student whose research focuses on animal history. His dissertation explores the history of horses and horse racing in Bogotá, Colombia. Before joining Rutgers, he served as an assistant professor at the Institute of Bioethics at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, where he taught courses on animal ethics.
Read the article here.
Nicole Burrowes discusses her forthcoming book at the AHA
CLAS affiliate, Nicole Burrowes, participated in an engaging and well-attended panel titled “New Research on Empire and Labor in the Americas and Beyond” at the American Historical Association's annual meeting in Chicago in January. Burrowes discussed her book Seeds for Solidarity: African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana, which explores the historical possibility of a movement forged by those at the edges of empire amid economic, political, and environmental crises, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in July 2026. Panelists included Mary Hicks, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Justin F. Jackson, and Rudi Batzell, and it was moderated by Daniel Immerwahr. They discussed the complex significance and evolving historiography of the relationship between empire and labor, marking the 10th anniversary of the influential work, Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism. The panel was sponsored by the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.