2019 Irene Ledesma Prize recipient Claire Thomson with Ledesma Committee Chair Katherine Morrissey at the at the 2019 CWWH Breakfast in Las Vegas, NV. Thomson is a PhD Candidate at the University of Alberta where she is working on her dissertation, “’To hell with this, I’m going back to Wood Mountain’: Lakota People and Lakota Thamakhoche (Lakota Country) in the US-Canada Borderlands.”
The Ledesma Committee also acknowledged the work of Ivón Padilla-Rodríquez, a PhD candidate at Columbia University, with an Honorable Mention for her dissertation project, “Migrants in the Making: Invisible Agricultural Child Labor, Women’s Anti-Child Labor Advocacy, and (Im)migrant Exclusion in the Twentieth Century.”
The CWWH awards the Irene Ledesma Prize to a Ph.D. graduate student to support their research in western women’s and gender history. The Prize is named in honor of Dr. Ledesma’s important contributions to the fields of Chicana and working-class history until her untimely death in 1997. That same year Ledesma received the annual CWWH Jensen-Miller Prize for her article “Texas Newspapers and Chicana Women’s Activism: 1919-1974” in the Western Historical Quarterly (26:3).
See a list of previous award recipients here: Irene Ledesma Prize Recipients, 1990-Present.
Deadline for the 2020 Prize Submission: August 15, 2020
Call for Applications: Ledesma Prize 2020
The $1,000 Prize supports travel to collections or other research expenses related to the histories of women and gender in the North American West. Applicants must be enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the time of application. The Coalition will award the Prize at the CWWH Breakfast during the Western History Association annual meeting. The CWWH will also award the recipient a one-year complimentary membership.
The Committee evaluates proposals according to the following criteria:
-How well the applicant stated her/his research question and the significance of the overall project.
-How well the applicant demonstrated her/his knowledge of the primary source materials related to the proposal.
-How well the applicant framed her/his project in terms for the broader theoretical/historiographical issues significant to the topic.
-How well the proposal addressed the issues of gender and/or women’s history in the North American West.
-How well the proposed budget details the applicant’s stated research agenda.
Application Procedure:
To apply, submit one copy of each of the following (as a single PDF file) to each member of the committee:
1. Cover sheet with your name, contact information, project tile, name of reference
2. Curriculum Vitae
3. A brief description of the research project and an explanation of how the prize funds would support the research (not exceeding three double-spaced pages, addressing the above criteria).
4. A line-item budget
5. Letter of support from the student’s dissertation advisor
Irene Ledesma Prize Committee
Margie Brown-Coronel (2020)
CSU Fullerton
mbrown-coronel@fullerton.edu
Traci Brynne Voyles (2021)
University of Oklahoma
voyles@ou.edu
Pablo Mitchell (2022)
Oberlin College
prmitche@oberlin.edu
$$ Donate to the Ledesma Prize Fund here! $$
2018 Irene Ledesma Prize recipient Jill Falcon Mackin (Anishinaabe: Ojibwe). Macksin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History & Philosophy at Montana State University working on Indigenous food systems and land practices. She was unable to attend the CWWH breakfast, but sent this video conveying her thanks.
2017 Irene Ledesma Recipient Tiffany Jasmin Gonzalez (right) with Prize Committee Chair Matt Basso (left) at the 2017 CWWH Breakfast in San Diego, California.
