AILASA AWARDS
AILASA 2025 AWARD WINNERS
Congratulations to the winners of the AILASA Awards 2025!
Monograph Award
2025 AILASA Monograph Award goes to Pre-Columbian Contact between the Americas and Oceania by Andrea Ballesteros Danel (2024) published by Palgrave Macmillan.
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This brilliant monograph which from archeology, history, and colonial studies examines the understudied role of Pacific Studies in Hispanic history. It compiles, updates, and disseminates centuries-long discussions on the encounters of First Nations peoples across the Pacific Ocean both eastward and westward.
Best PhD Thesis
2025 AILASA Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation goes to 'Digital Cumbia: The Role of DJs/Producers in Creolization' by Moses Iten from RMIT.
This thesis received glowing reports as a highly innovative project that "intersects ethnomusicology, popular music studies, ethnography, cultural studies and sociology." The impact to multiple disciplines demonstrates the breaths and reach of the research, "addressing cumbia not only as a musical genre but, importantly, as a transglobal social and cultural process" taking into consideration cumbia's origins in Colombia’s Caribbean coast "from a tricultural blend of African, Indigenous American and European influences."
Best Honours Thesis
2025 AILASA Prize for the Best Honours Dissertation goes to "'We should have a film now, that's what's missing:' Re-reading Manuel Puig's cinematic narration in Kiss of the Spider Woman" by Yaoyun Zhang from the Australian National University.
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Yaoyun's thesis examined how the ekphrasis of the six films narrated in the novel mediates, reflects and interacts with the reality in the text. The examiners noted that the thesis proposed "an original and ambitious research question" as well as a "convincing contribution to existing scholarly debates" and "filling a key gap not explored in previous scholarship on the novel." The thesis went "beyond what was expected in an Honours thesis and suggest outstanding potential for future research."
Call for Nominations: 2025 AILASA Awards
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Call for nominations for the 2025 AILASA Awards have closed.
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Categories for nomination are:
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1. Best Honours Dissertation (conferred in late 2024 or 2025)
2. Best PhD Thesis (conferred in 2024 or 2025)
3. Most outstanding Article by Early Career Researcher (published in 2025)
4. Best Monograph (published in 2023 or 2024)
5. Lifetime Contribution Award
Please click the hyperlinks above to access the nomination guidelines and eligibility.
All submissions are electronic via ailasa@ailasa.org.
Kind regards,
AILASA Executive Committee​​​