PLAS honors compelling undergraduate scholarship, supporting two awards that recognize stellar thesis work. The Stanley J. Stein Senior Thesis Prize is awarded to the best thesis on a Latin American topic. The Kenneth Maxwell Senior Thesis Prize is awarded for the best thesis related to Brazil.
Prize Nominees
Brenda S. Bazalar Alpiste, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Structural Study of Split Bamboo Hyperbolic Paraboloid Grid Shell
Adviser: Sigrid M. Adriaenssens
Theodore Bhatia, School of Public and International Affairs
Lessons from Lions and Teachings from Ticos: Attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to El Salvador
Adviser: Juan Carlos Pinzon
Gabriela Cejas, Economics
Confronting the Kingpins Court: The Impact of OFAC Sanctions on Communities around Cartels and Organized Crime Groups in Mexico
Adviser: Pascaline Dupas
Thomas Colouras, Sociology
Patching Community Together: U.S. Forcibly Removed People and the Reinvention of Community in Mexico City Call Centers
Adviser: Patricia Fernández-Kelly
Wilson Conn, Spanish and Portuguese
La estética del hombre: Form and Gender Politics in Patricio Guzmán’s Filmography, 1972–2022
Adviser: Javier Guerrero
Brandon Matthew Gauthier, Politics
Aztec Order: International Relations in Pre-Columbian Mexico
Adviser: John Ikenberry
Isabella Gomes, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Building Sector Trends and Embodied Emissions in São Paulo: Implications for Decarbonization with Inclusion, Sufficiency, and Dematerialization
Adviser: Anu Ramaswami
Sejal Shri Goud, School of Public and International Affairs
Keeping Autonomy Afloat: Understanding Community-Driven Climate Mobility Through a Political Subjects Frame in Gunayala, Panama
Adviser: Barbara Buckinx
Gordon Robinson Helmers, History
Crafting Montonerismo: An Ideology More Peronist than Perón
Adviser: Corinna Zeltsman
Mariana Icaza Diaz, Economics
Raíces que Pesan: Intergenerational Wealth and the Geography of Opportunity in Mexico
Adviser: Pascaline Dupas
Gil Sander Joseph, Sociology
Brezil Se Lakay Mwen: Challenging the Mobility Bias in the Study of Onward Migration
Adviser: Filiz Garip
Rosangela Lopez, Sociology
Punitive Rehabilitation?: Addiction, Incarceration, and Recovery
Adviser: Patrick Sharkey
Alex S. MacArthur, History
The Making of an Itinerant Abolitionist: Rethinking Emiliano Mundrucú
Adviser: David Bell
Julia Nees, Anthropology
The Price of Pretty: Race, Representation, and the Politics of Beauty in Brazil
Adviser: Onur Günay
Ruby Platt, History
“The Spirit of the Law”: Formerly Enslaved Women in Jamaica’s Abolition-era Courts 1834-1838
Adviser: Wendy Warren
Asa Santos, Anthropology
I Who Did Not Die: The Gift of Grief & What Happens After Death
Adviser: Jeffrey Himpele
José Andrés Virgen Ortiz, Anthropology
The Oral Histories We Carry but Don’t Dare to Speak: Colorism, Race, Silence, and Memory in the Contemporary “Mestiza” Experience in Los Altos de Jalisco, México
Adviser: Hanna Garth
2025 Stanley J. Stein Senior Thesis Prize
This prize is awarded by PLAS each year to the student who writes the best senior thesis on a Latin American-related topic.
Ruby Platt
Ruby Platt
Department of History
“The Spirit of the Law”: Formerly Enslaved Women in Jamaica’s Abolition-era Courts 1834-1838
Thesis Adviser:
Wendy Warren, Associate Professor, History
"Ruby Platt’s thesis explores the encounters of formerly enslaved women and an imperial legal system in one of the Americas’ most profitable colony. Engaging with readings from Latin America and Caribbean contexts, the thesis builds from careful archival research to show that freed women learned from communication and observation in order to better navigate a system that was designed to work against them. Platt reveals that was exactly at the interstices of the normative systems – including magisterial discretion, sympathies and alignments – that formerly enslaved women found hope."
2025 Kenneth Maxwell Senior Thesis Prize
This prize is awarded by PLAS on behalf of the Firestone Library to the student who writes the best senior thesis related to Brazil.
Gil Sander Joseph
Gil Sander Joseph
Department of Sociology
Brezil Se Lakay Mwen: Challenging the Mobility Bias in the Study of Onward Migration
Thesis Adviser:
Filiz Garip, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs
"Gil Joseph’s senior thesis is a remarkable and highly original work that centers on an often-overlooked migrant population: Haitians who find in Brazil a sometimes unexpected place of refuge. Rather than approaching migration primarily through the lens of displacement, Joseph compellingly shifts the focus to immobility—examining those who, after complex deliberation, choose to stop moving and remain in Brazil, even if their original intention was, in many cases, to continue on to wealthier destinations like the United States. His thesis thus stands out for its exploration of an understudied South–South migration route from and to Latin America, and for advancing a conceptual framework that approaches mobility through its opposite: the decision not to move."
Asa Santos
Asa Santos
Department of Anthropology
I Who Did Not Die: The Gift of Grief & What Happens After Death
Thesis Adviser:
Jeffrey Himpele, Director, Ethnographic Data Visualization Lab, Lecturer in Anthropology
"Asa Santos’s thesis is an intimate anthropological meditation on grief and personhood through the death of her Black grandmother in Brazil. Crucially, she argues that to honor Black life after death, we must move beyond frameworks shaped by whiteness and retrieve Afro-Brazilian religious understandings of death erased by colonialism. Through an 'individualized' approach to healthcare and Brazil from within her grief, Santos offers a decisive contribution to medical anthropology and the anthropology of death in Brazil."