Prof. Kristyl Obispado, PhD of the UP Diliman (UPD) Department of History is the winner of the 2021 World History Association (WHA) Dissertation Prize for her dissertation “The Pacific sailors: Global workers at and on the edge of the Spanish empire (1580s-1640s).”
According to its website (https://www.thewha.org/about/), the WHA, founded in 1982, is a professional association of scholars, teachers, and students organized to promote world history by encouraging teaching, research, publications, and personal interaction.
The association yearly awards the WHA Dissertation Prize to the best doctoral dissertation in world, global, or transnational history. Transnational history is defined by the WHA as “one that examines any historical issue with global implications, including but not limited to the exchange and interchange of cultures, the comparison of two or more civilizations or cultures, or the study in a macrohistorical manner of a phenomenon that had a global impact.”
Aside from Obispado’s dissertation, notable other winners at the 2021 WHA Dissertation Prize were the honorable mentions, “Liberated Africans and Law in the South Atlantic, c. 1839 – 1871” by Jake Richards, and “A Sea of Wealth: Sayyid Sa’id bin Sultan, His Omani Empire, and the Making of An Oceanic Marketplace” by Nicholas Roberts.
Obispado is assistant professor at UPD and specializes in early colonial history of the Philippines and Latin America, early global history, Pacific trade, colonial labor and migration, and microhistory. She does paleography and archival research, and can speak Filipino, English, and Spanish.
She is author of, among others, “Ang mga Marinong Pilipino sa ika-17 Siglo [The Filipino Seamen in the 17th Century]” published in Saliksik: Saysay ng Salaysay, a refereed E-journal, in 2013, and “Ang Bayan ng Mariveles sa Harap ng Pangangayaw Pagsapit ng ika-18 Siglo [The Town of Mariveles during Slave Raiding in the 18th Century]” published in Daluyan: Journal ng Wikang Filipino, a refereed journal, in 2010.
Obispado presently heads the five-volume book project, “Galleons and social control in the Spanish Empire” for the National Historical Commission of the Philippines. This is currently under review and is set to be published sometime between 2022 and 2023.
She is a recipient of various grants, awards, and fellowships, the latest of which are the UP PhD Incentive Awards (2022 – 2023), Beca Tesis, Centro de Estudios Históricos, Fundación Colmex, and Fordecyt-Pronaces (August 2019 – December 2020), and the research fellowship of Instituto de Historia del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid, Spain (August 2018 – Jan. 16, 2019). Obispado earned her PhD (history) and master’s degree (history) from El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico in 2021 and 2018, respectively, and her bachelor’s degree (history) from UPD in 2006, graduating magna cum laude.