The Agustín de Betancourt Prize is awarded annually for research carried out in the Canary Islands that contributes to advancing and renewing the study of different fields. In its 2020 edition, the award was attributed to a publication of excellence in the Arts and Humanities that has contributed to a better understanding and dissemination of the artistic, idiosyncratic and linguistic expressions of the human being.
The winning article was published in the “Archives and Manuscripts” journal of the Society of Australian Archivists / Taylor & Francis (vol. 48, no.1, January-March 2020), indexed in different international indexes, including Scopus. The publication was preceded by two moments of peer-review (proposal and text), in a highly competitive context, opened by the journal, aiming to highlight the “emerging scholars” in the field of Archival Science. 73 proposals were submitted from all over the world and 15 were accepted (publication in vols. 46, no. 3 and 48, no.1 – 2018 and 2020).
The research analyses the transformations caused by natural and/or human factors in family archives, explaining how, in cases of damage or destruction, families carried out the reconstruction of their own archives to manage and defend their family heritage and memory. Based on a mixed method of qualitative analysis of inventories, protocols and farm books and on the quantitative study of the “genealogy of the document”, the research depicts how the reconstruction of family archives strongly interlinked with social, political, military and family conflicts. It also highlights the linkage between the legal framework, the social and cultural context of modern Spain and the adoption of new archival practices for the conservation and management of documents by families, practices that seem to constitute part of a progressive inclusion of these islands in the context that Antonio Castillo has called the “New Culture of Archives” for mainland Spain.
Judit Gutiérrez de Armas holds a PhD in History, branch of Historical Archivistics, internationally co-supervised by the universities of La Laguna and Nova de Lisbon (2019). A member of the Institute of Medieval Studies since 2017, she is part of the group ARQ. FAM (Family Archives) directed by Professor Maria de Lurdes Rosa, within which she developed her PhD thesis “El fondo Conde de Siete Fuentes: la construcción de la memoria de linaje y la identidad aristocrática a través de un archivo de familia (siglos XVI-XX)”. The PhD, funded by FCT, and based at the IEM, was supervised by Professors Juan Ramón Núñez Pestano and María de Lurdes Rosa and awarded the Extraordinary Doctoral Prize by the University of La Laguna (2020). A historian, she holds a Master’s Degree in Documentation, Library and Archive Management from the Complutense University of Madrid (2013), another Master’s Degree in Teacher Training from the European University of the Canary Islands (2020) and is a university expert in Genealogy and Archives at the University of Córdoba (2018). She was Professor of Modern History at the University of La Laguna.
Photo captions:
Image 1: Dr. Judit Gutiérrez de Armas and Alfredo Luaces, general director of the Fundación CajaCanarias.
Image 2: Professor Juan Ramón Núñez Pestano (left), Dr. Judit Gutiérrez de Armas (centre) and Professor Ernesto Pereda de Pablo, vice-rector for research at the Universidade de La Laguna (right)