At its Annual Conference, the Australian Society of Archivists announced the attribution of the Sigrid McCausland Emerging Writers Award 2020 to Judit Gutiérrez de Armas, for her article “Archival practices in Early Modern Spain: transformation, destruction and (re)construction of family archives in the Canary Islands” (2020) published in the journal “Archives and Manuscripts”, published by Taylor & Francis (vol. 48, no. 1, January-March 2020), indexed in different international indexes, including JCR.
The Sigrid McCausland Emerging Writers Award recognises the best work by postgraduate students or doctoral candidates who have published an article on Archives and Manuscripts in the last three years. In this case, the award-winning publication was preceded by two peer-reviews (proposal and text) in a highly competitive context, opened by the journal with the aim of showcasing emerging scholars in the field of archival science. 73 proposals were submitted from all over the world and 15 were accepted (published in vols. 46, no.3 and 48, no.1, in 2018 and 2020, respectively).
Historical Archivistic Research
In this study, Judit Gutiérrez de Armas analyses the transformation processes experienced by family archives on the Canary Islands between the 16th and 18th centuries. Through analysis of the archival practices of several families such as Salazar de Frías, Hoyo Solórzano, Lercaro, Castillo, Sopranis or Van Emden, among others, the author analyses the different episodes in the destruction, theft or seizure of archives in situations of social, political, military or family conflict, and even by natural disasters, such as the eruption of the Arenas Negras volcano in 1706, which destroyed the archive of the Counts of Siete Fuentes. The study set out to explain how families dealt with the reconstruction of their archives, fundamental tools for defending their heritage and conveying memories of their family.
Deploying a combination of qualitative methods applied to inventories, protocols and family books and the quantitative study of “document genealogy”, Judit Gutiérrez de Armas demonstrates how several family archives in the Canary Islands are the result of reconstruction processes undertaken in the 17th and 18th centuries.
This is not the first recognition received by this Historical Archivistic research as it has already been recognised by the “Agustín de Betancourt” 2020 Research Prize awarded by Fundación CajaCanarias.
Judit Gutiérrez de Armas holds a PhD in History, specialist field of Historical Archivistics, following international co-supervision 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 doctoral 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)”, funded by the FCT, 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 Masters in Documentation, Library and Archive Management from the Complutense University of Madrid (2013), a Master’s Degree in Teacher Training from the European University of the Canary Islands (2020) and was a university expert in Genealogy and Archives at the University of Córdoba (2018). She is currently Professor of Modern History at the University of La Laguna.