CCWH Prelinger Award Winner

LINDA RUPERT (2006)

The Coordinating Council for Women in History is pleased to announce that Linda Rupert has been awarded the ninth annual CCWH-Prelinger Scholarship Award of $20,000. Dr. Rupert has just defended her dissertation on “Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World.” She will be starting as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in August 2006.

Dr. Rupert will be using the Prelinger Scholarship for a two-part project. The first part will focus on archival research to supplement the material in her dissertation with the intention of writing a book on Creolization and Contraband, illuminating the role of women and people of African descent in the contraband trade. The second part of her project is a public history component to return the story to the people of Curaçao. She will develop a museum exhibit with accompanying booklet about the central role of the black majority during the island’s glory days as a Caribbean trade center in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This material will be presented in Papiamentu, the island’s local language. Additionally, Dr. Rupert is planning a series of radio shows and newspaper articles, as well as workshops for educators on this topic.

In keeping with the guidelines of the Prelinger Award, Dr. Rupert has taken a winding road to her present academic position. As a young woman in the 1970’s and 1980’s, she worked as an adult educator in urban shantytowns and peasant communities in Peru. Her work cut short by a human rights crisis in the Andes, she moved to New York City to study at the New School for Social Research, supporting herself working full time for the Ecumenical Committee on the Andes, a small human rights organization. Now married, she followed her husband, an anthropologist, back to his native Curaçao, where she spent the next fourteen years, bringing up two daughters, founding a text-writing business and working as Program Director for the Curaçao Women’s Center. When commissioned by the Curaçao Chamber of Commerce to write about the island’s commercial history, she found herself following sources to uncover the contributions of market women, sailors and slaves. This encouraged her to return to graduate school to learn more about academic research so that she could do better justice to the sources and stories which she had uncovered. Now beginning a new, academic career, she is determined to return these stories to their true owners, the people of Curaçao.

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The Coordinating Council for Women in History, an organization for women in the historical profession, is committee to exploring the diverse experiences and histories of all women. Its primary goals are to educate men and women on the status of women in the historical profession and to promote research and interpretation in the areas of women’s history.

Information about the Prelinger Prize and other CCWH awards is available here.