Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

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Application Deadline May 8, 2026

Dissertation Prize

Opportunities

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) Dissertation Prize is an annual prize awarded for the best dissertation in the area of Latin American and Caribbean Studies by a current Brown University graduate student.

Supported by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the award recognizes superior scholarly achievements. The CLACS Dissertation Prize carries with it an award of $500, which may be paid directly to the student as a prize or reimbursed against research costs.

All submissions are reviewed by the CLACS committee to determine the final winner.

Nomination Process and Requirements

Nominations and required materials should be submitted via email to maria_isabel_marin@brown.edu with a carbon copy (cc) to clacs@brown.edu. The email must use the subject heading “CLACS Dissertation Prize Nomination”.
The award is open to current Brown University graduate students from any discipline.
Each candidate must be nominated by his or her program, and each doctoral program may submit only one nomination.
To be eligible, candidates must defend and submit their Ph.D. dissertation by the end of April.
Each application must include:
1. a nominating letter from the dissertation advisor, including a brief description of the dissertation;
2. an abstract of the dissertation in PDF format, which must not exceed 400 words; and
3. a copy of the finalized and complete version of the Ph.D. dissertation, also in PDF format.

Deadline: May 8, 2026 | 5 p.m.

CLACS Dissertation Prize Recipients

Awarded for outstanding doctoral dissertations in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Alexander Hardan ’26 Ph.D.

Musicology & Ethnomusicology
“Listening for Sovietization in Cold War Cuba”

Sonic Ideologies: Alexander Hardan’s Award-Winning Dissertation on Soviet-Cuban Musical Exchange

Alexander Hardan, a doctoral graduate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology, has been awarded the CLACS Dissertation Prize for his outstanding doctoral dissertation, Listening for Sovietization in Cold War Cuba.

Hardan's transdisciplinary thesis unearths the complex cultural geographies of the "sonido ruso" (Russian sound) within the mid-to-late twentieth-century Caribbean, blending musicology, periodical culture, performance studies, and archival oral histories.

The Selection Committee writes:

The doctoral thesis "Listening for Sovietization in Cold War Cuba" is an exquisitely written, methodologically astute dissertation that places Cuban culture in contact with the world in ways that are both necessary and unexpected. The author, Alexander Hardan, has constructed a conceptually rich and transdisciplinary thesis in which he combines musicology, history, performance, periodical cultures, and even literature in order to recount an evanescent object: the so-called "sonido ruso" (Russian sound) in Cuba during the Cold War. Through oral histories and public and private archives, the dissertation offers a profound meditation on the body brought into proximity with sound, as well as on the political relationships between the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Through this dissertation, Hardan recounts the history of an ideal and a belief shared between two countries for more than fifty years (during and after the Cold War), and in so doing awakens the senses, the intellect, and memory to a little-studied alliance in our in America: the way that Central European and Russian music came into contact with forms of music-making and social and political processes of the Caribbean. Hardan finds that the “Russian sound” is a transnational site of culture grounded in institutions and in Cuba’s national and embodied memory. Within this belief in a Russian sound, ideology, politics, music, and performance converge to produce Cuba’s participation, negotiation, and labor within both its own history and that of the Soviet Union: all through what the author calls a “Cuban-Soviet musical alliance,” one that created institutions, social relations, genealogies, and forms of art, politics, and propaganda in the twentieth-century Caribbean.

For its originality and rigor, for its commitment to reading the local through a global perspective, and for thinking Cuban musical history in dialogue with the classical music of Central and Eastern Europe within a specific political context, the committee celebrates Hardan’s major contribution to the social and musical history of Latin America.

Augusta da Silveira de Oliveira ’26 Ph.D.

History
"Entendidas or Women in the Know: Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century Brazil"

Histories of Resistance: Augusta da Silveira de Oliveira’s Award-Winning Dissertation on Brazilian Lesbian Communities

Augusta da Silveira de Oliveira, a doctoral graduate in History, has been awarded the CLACS Dissertation Prize for her outstanding doctoral dissertation, “Entendidas or Women in the Know: Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century Brazil.”

da Silveira e Oliveira’s work offers a groundbreaking correction to regional historiography, shifting analytical focus to female same-sex experiences across diverse urban centers in Brazil, including Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre.

The Selection Committee writes:

Augusta da Silveira de Oliveira's doctoral dissertation, "Entendidas or Women in the Know: Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century Brazil," constitutes an extraordinary and highly necessary contribution. The work not only fills a fundamental gap in the history of lesbian life (in Brazil in particular and Latin America more broadly), but does so with remarkable analytical acuity, methodological rigor, and narrative eloquence. This research shifts the focus away from male homosexuality and decisively broadens historiographical inquiry through a centering of female experience. The project’s broad temporal scope makes it possible to reconstruct the different stages and transformations of lesbian life, thereby granting it historical depth and avoiding teleological or presentist readings.

Moreover, the richness and diversity of the archive are exceptional: the author skillfully interweaves judicial, journalistic, literary, and documentary sources with great interpretive dexterity. Added to this is an equally ambitious spatial scope, as the study encompasses cities such as Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre, beyond the more commonly studied Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The result is a robust and complex investigation, capable of articulating the urban, the public, the private, activism, intimacy, and everyday life. Finally, this is an exceedingly well-written dissertation, one that successfully combines historical fidelity with a powerful capacity for storytelling.