Three Latin Americanist historians have been awarded 2026 prizes by the History of Science Society for their scholarship.<\/p>\n
The Ronald Rainger Award Committee awarded this year’s Ronald Rainger Early Career Award in History of the Earth and Environmental Sciences<\/strong> to Gloria Maritza G\u00f3mez Revuelta<\/strong> and Lachlan Summers<\/strong> for \u201cNegotiating the \u2018Geo\u2019 of Cold War Geopolitics: Seismology as Diplomacy during the International Geophysical Year (1957\u201358).\u201d<\/p>\n G\u00f3mez Revuelta and Summers develop the concept of \u201ccompromised autonomy\u201d to demonstrate how Mexican seismologists used the International Geophysical Year as a platform to negotiate issues of scientific universalism, international cooperation and regional sovereignty. Through three meticulously researched case studies, the authors extend the rich historiography on the geopolitics of the global Cold War to tell an Inter-American history of scientific diplomacy. By seamlessly interweaving scientific practices, institutions, and theories, the authors demonstrate how negotiation balanced Cold War power relations, while recognizing the importance of both. The committee was particularly impressed by the paper\u2019s clear argumentation, fluidity of prose, and tethering of anthropological and historical perspectives. As a signal contribution to the expanding historiography of earth sciences in Latin America, this paper exemplifies the power and promise of collaborative research and writing by emerging scholars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The\u00a02026 Levinson Prize<\/strong>\u00a0goes\u00a0to\u00a0Christopher Heaney<\/strong>\u2019s Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and\u00a0the\u00a0Peruvian\u00a0Ancestors\u00a0of\u00a0American Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2023). This elegantly conceptualized, impeccably researched, and vividly written work charts the lives and afterlives of Incan, Andean, and ancient Peruvian human remains over half a millennia. A tale of both exploitation and care, Empires of the Dead explores the roots of American anthropology in the exhumation, exportation, and analysis of mummies and skulls.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Heaney\u2019s consideration of scholarly debates and controversies surrounding mortuary culture raises questions fundamental to the study of natural history and the life sciences, including the role of museums in centralizing materials in institutions far removed from the locations where they were unearthed, and the deep enmeshing of scientific and medical knowledge in practices of both colonial and anti-colonial politics. Anthropologists based in Spain, the United States, and Latin America used their mortuary studies to mobilize the past for the politics of their respective presents, and varied widely in the visual representations they created and the meanings they drew from their analyses. Rather than following only the fraught process by which human remains were turned into specimens, Heaney invites readers to consider also how those specimens were given new meanings and new lives. Empires of the Dead thoughtfully interrogates how anthropologists have conceptualized the relationship between past and present as well as animate and inanimate matter. The dead, in short, remain lively agents in our histories of science.<\/p>\n A warm congratulations to our colleagues!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three Latin Americanist historians have been awarded 2026 prizes by the History of Science Society for their scholarship. The Ronald Rainger Award Committee awarded this year’s Ronald Rainger Early Career Award in History of the Earth and Environmental Sciences to Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta and Lachlan Summers for “Negotiating the ‘Geo’ of Cold War Geopolitics: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":1529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","nfd_image_url":"","nfd_onboarding_generated":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"language":[],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sin-categorizar"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1531"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cienciasysaberes.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=1531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}