It is with great pleasure, the Manuscript Society Scholarship Committee announces Ms Silvia Escanilla Huerta, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as the winner of the Richard Maass Research Grant for 2017. She will use the prize to travel to repositories in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Spain to research manuscripts to support the thesis of her dissertation entitled, “Neither Patriots Nor Royalists: Indigenous People and the Process of Independence in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1783-1828.” In it, she argues that indigenous political activism was fundamental before and during the war for Peruvian independence. She expects to “recover indigenous voices that are important…for understanding the past, but more importantly understanding the present of a deeply diverse Latin American reality.”

Ms. Escanilla Huerta has degrees from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad de San Andres, also in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is fluent in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French.

The Maass grant is named in memory of humanitarian, benefactor and legendary collector Richard Maass, one of the founders of the Manuscript Society. Applicants must be pursuing a graduate degree at an accredited College or University that holds institutional membership in The Manuscript Society and be formally sponsored by that institutional member. The $5,000 grant is to be used for expenses related directly to research using original manuscripts.

Application acceptance for the 2018 Richard Maass Research Grant begins December 1, 2017 with a deadline of February 14, 2018. Notification of the winner is around March 17, 2018.