National recognition for Concordia's Nora Jaffary

That’s when the Canadian Historical Association announced her as winner of the 2017 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize for her book Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905.

The prestigious prize recognizes an outstanding scholarly book in a field other than Canadian history.

“Nora's book is richly deserving of this major award, which is one of the two highest honours offered by the CHA each year,” says Peter Gossage, chair of Concordia’s Department of History.

“In the last three decades of the 19th century, when Mexico was ruled by the authoritarian liberal presidency of Porfirio Díaz, denunciations of women for the crime of abortion dramatically increased,” Jaffary explains. 

“However, it bears remembering that the era was in fact an historical anomaly to Mexico’s ‘traditional’ experience. Through the colonial period, and much of the 19th century, this was a society that assumed women’s reproductive choices were their own business.”

The award tops off a successful spring for Jaffary, who was also recently awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant and a two-month residential research fellowship by the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Find out more about Concordia’s Department of History.