Ithaca College

The Latin American Studies minor program at Ithaca College congratulates Dr. Jennifer Jolly for her recent Best Book Award at the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies (MACLAS) Annual Conference at Stony Brook University (March 8-9th). The Arthur P. Whitaker Prize is awarded each year for the best book published in the previous two years by a MACLAS member in good standing for the past two years.

Her book Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).

In the view of the Whitaker Prize Committee:  "Professor Jolly's book offers a fresh, innovative, creative, and highly original treatment of a wide range of intertwined issues relating to state formation, nation-building, identity and community formation, transnational cultural relations, and cultural production relating especially to tourism and the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. Emphasizing national and transnational actors as well as local agency, Jolly’s book offers a rich, insightful, compelling narrative and analysis of an important set questions that scholars have only begun to explore. Meticulously researched and elegantly written – and, for a book on cultural history, blessedly free of jargon – Jolly’s examination of the ways that art and tourism “functioned together as a technology of nation-building” (p. 4) under President Lázaro Cárdenas not only advances our understanding of this specific episode in post-Revolutionary Mexican history. Her study also has many comparative implications that promise to push the literature in new and fruitful directions. For these reasons we are delighted to award the 2019 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize to Professor Jennifer Jolly of Ithaca College."

She will be the Keynote Speaker (Whitaker Address) at the next MACLAS meeting on March 6-7, 2020 @ Salisbury University, MD.

Congratulations, Jennifer!