We warmly congratulate Gabriel Lesser, who was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s (LASA) Nineteenth Century Section Best Doctoral Dissertation Award. He received his PhD from the Spanish & Portuguese Department in 2025. His dissertation, “Hegemonic Humor: Racial Satires, Caricatures, and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Brazil,” offers a compelling comparative analysis of how humor shaped racial imaginaries in nineteenth-century print culture, challenging established narratives of nation-building in Mexico and Brazil.
The evaluation committee wrote the following about Gabriel’s dissertation:
“Gabriel Lesser's dissertation brilliantly links satirical cultural production with the regulation and reproduction of race in the Americas, drawing on a unique archive that enables comparative analysis between Mexico and Brazil. By tracing discourses around Chinese and African diasporic populations through popular print in both countries, Lesser effectively challenges established assumptions about nineteenth-century nation-building projects. His work is especially illuminating in its attention to the economic dimensions of humor and their relationship to the shaping of racial discourse, conflict, and ontology in the Americas — what he describes as the "commercialization of race." This is an imaginative, beautifully written, and intellectually far-reaching project.”