Prizes & Awards
The Lydia Cabrera Award
award Amount
Up to $5,000
2026 submission Deadline
June 1, 2026
Award Overview
Research award of up to $5000 given to support the study of Cuba between 1492 and 1868.
Lydia Cabrera Awards are available to support the study of Cuba between 1492 and 1868. Awards are designed specifically to support:
1) original research on Cuban history in Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. archives
2) the publication of meritorious books on Cuba currently out of print
3) the publication of historical statistics, historical documents, and guides to Spanish archives relating to Cuban history between 1492 and 1868
A limited number of awards will be made annually up to a maximum of $5,000.
Applicants must be trained in the Caribbean and Latin American history and possess knowledge of Spanish. Successful applicants will be expected to disseminate the results of their research in scholarly publications and/or professional papers delivered at scholarly conferences and public lectures at educational institutions.
Applicants for original research are to be currently engaged in graduate studies at a U. S. institution or be affiliated with a college/university faculty or accredited historical association in the United States. Each applicant should provide a two-page curriculum vita, a detailed itinerary and a budget statement, a three-page narrative description of the proposed project, and three letters of support. Republication proposals should include letter(s) of intent from a publisher.
Please send your application materials to the three committee members listed below, using the file name “LastName_Cabrera,” by June 1, 2026. Please make sure that the subject line is “Last Name – Cabrera.”
Note: The CLAH requires current membership for all of its prizes and awards.
Please send all submissions to each of the committee members listed below.
Scobie Award Committee for 2026:
Donations to the Cabrera Award fund can be made here.
2025
Co-winners:
Keith Richards, Tulane University, “Commerce and Colonialism: Eastern Cuba and the 17th-Century Caribbean”
Justin Jones, Vanderbilt University, “America’s Most Wanted: Revolutionary Privateering and the Illegal Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World”
2024
Bonnie Lucero, Texas Christian University, “Powering the Laboring Body: Beef as a Product of Primary Necessity during Colonial Cuba’s Plantation Slavery Boom, 1760s-1820s”
Dalia Griñan, Rutgers University, “Tracing Intimate Knowledge’: African Women in Nineteenth Century Urban Cuba”
2023
No award
2022
Sophia Kitlinski, Yale Univeristy
Daylin Pujol López, Tulane University
2021
Oriol Regué Sendros, Johns Hopkins University, “At the Fringes of Slavery: Forced Labor, Colonial Experiments, and the Spanish Empire in Nineteenth-Century Cuba”
2020
No applications submitted due to the COVID-19 pandemic
2019
Scott Doebler, Pennsylvania State University, “Creating a Connected Caribbean: Entangled Commodity Ecologies of Colonial Yucatán, Cuba, and Jamaica, 1492-1717”
2018
David C. LaFevor, University of Texas at Arlington, “The Arguelles Affair and the Slave Ship Ciceron”
2017
Bethany Marie Wade, University of Pittsburgh, “Cemeteries and the Social Order in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean”
William Morgan, Lone Star College, “Tobacco and Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba”
2016
Jason Daniel, Florida International University, “Contraband, Ship Construction, and Environmental Change in Cuba under the Early Spanish Bourbons, 1700-1762”
2015
Adriana Chira, University of Michigan, “Owning Intimacies: Slavery, Family, and Property among Afro-descendants in Santiago de Cuba, 1803-1868”
Jorge Felipe, Michigan State University, “The Origins of the Cuban-based Slave Trade: Atlantic Networks and Local Changes (1789-1820)”
2014
Scott Cave, Pennsylvania State University, “Signals: Cross-Cultural Communication in the Spanish Atlantic Frontier, 1470-1570”
2013
Andrés Pletch, University of Michigan, “State of Exception”
2012
Joseph M. Clark, The Johns Hopkins University, “Regional Exchange in the Atlantic World: The Caribbean ‘Mirror Cities’ of Havana and Veracruz in the Seventeenth Century”
2011
Sitela Alvarez, Tulane University, “The Religious and Nationalist Transformation of Cuba”
2010
Jacqueline Kent, University of Miami, “Public Performance: Libres de Color Negotiating Equality in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba, 1844-1868”
2009 (Co-Winners)
Joanna Elrick, Vanderbilt University, “Black Religions with White Faces: The Creolization of Religious Belief and Practice in Cuba, 1650-1750”
Daniel Rood, University of California, Irvine, “Industrial Epistemologies: Slavery, Technology, and Economy in the Atlantic World, 1840-1860”
2008
Rachel Hynson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Politicians, Physicians, and Psychopaths: Public Responses to Insanity in Cuba, 1854-1868”
2007 (Co-Winners)
Amanda Warnock, Rutgers University, “Partner and Rivals: New England, Cuba, and the Atlantic World”
Alejandro de la Fuente, University of Pittsburgh, “Slaves and the Law in Colonial Cuba”
2006 (Co-Winners)
Eric Paul, University of California, Davis, “Enlightenment Slavery: The Cuban Plantation in the Age of Revolution”
Marianne Samayoa, University of Minnesota, “Shaping Health Care in Early Nineteenth-Century Cuba”
David Wheat, Vanderbilt University, “Shouldering the Golden Age: Africans and Afrocreoles in Havana, 1580-1640”
2005
Aisha Finch, New York University, “Junctures of Insurgency: Cuban Slaves and the Conspiracy of La Escalera, 1843-44”
2004
Evelyn Powell Jennings, Saint Lawrence University, “State Slavery in Colonial Havana, 1763-1840”
2003
No award (no applications received)
2002
Michele Reid, University of Texas at Austin, “Negotiating a Slave Regime: Free People of Color in Cuba, 1844-1868”
2001
Maria Elena Diaz, Merrill College, “Slave Emancipation and the Changing Meanings of Freedom in Cuba and Spain, 1780-1810”
Charlotte Cosner, Florida International University, “Rich and Poor, Black and White, Slave and Free: A Social History of Cuba’s Tobacco Farmers, 1763-1817”
William Van Norman, University of North Carolina, “Shade Grown Slavery: Life on a Coffee Plantation in Western Cuba, 1790-1845”
2000
Luis Martínez Fernández, Rutgers University, “Translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s “Political Essay on the Island of Cuba”
David A. Sartorius, University of North Carolina, “The Limits of Loyalty: Race and the Public Sphere in19th Century Cienfuegos”
1999
Jane Landers, Vanderbilt University, “Afro-Floridian Exiles in Cuba, 1763 and 1821″
1998
Marikay McCabe, Columbia University, “Regulating Work, Legislating Gender: ‘Public Women’ in Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba”
M. Sherry Johnson, Florida International University “The Majority Were Totally Destroyed: Natural Disasters and the Course of Cuban History, 1763-1804”
1997
Jeffrey Voris, Emory University, “The Development of 16th Century Cuban Society”
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Stanford University, “Empire and Anti- Slavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833-1898″
1996
Matt D. Childs, University of Texas at Austin, “The Aponte Conspiracy of 1812”
1995
Joseph Carroll Dorsey, Hamilton College, “Troubled Tao: Self, Otherness, and Dissidence Among Chinese Workers in Nineteenth-Century Cuba”
1994
Amy Ferlazzo, “Vagrancy in 19th Century Cuba 1820-1868″
Alfonso Quiroz, Columbia University, “The Origins of Financial Institutions in Cuba 1840-1868″
Linda Salvucci, Trinity University, “Spanish Protectionist Policies US-Cuba Trade, 1821-1898″