{"id":77,"date":"2018-01-14T14:50:24","date_gmt":"2018-01-14T19:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s27\/?page_id=77"},"modified":"2026-03-04T13:18:55","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T18:18:55","slug":"new-political-science-dissertation-award","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s27\/executive-committee\/new-political-science-dissertation-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award<\/strong><\/h3>\n

For an outstanding Political Science dissertation finished within the previous year of the APSA Meeting, which exemplifies the commitment to use scholarship in the struggle to make the study of political science relevant to building a more democratic and egalitarian economic, social, and political order.<\/p>\n

2026 Nomination Deadline: April 1st, 2026<\/strong>
\nCommittee: Ricardo Vega Le\u00f3n and Dan Jacobs<\/strong>
\nContact: Ricardo Vega Le\u00f3n (Chair) rvegaleo@calpoly.edu\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Nominations must be made in writing to the Committee Chair, Ricardo Vega Le\u00f3n (rvegaleo@calpoly.edu), by a member of the dissertation committee or a scholar with relevant knowledge of the dissertation, and all committee members must receive a copy by April 1st in order to be eligible for consideration.<\/span><\/p>\n

2025 Recipient: Ricardo Esteban Vega Le\u00f3n
\n\u201cCapitalist Abolitionism: Racial Capitalism After the End of Slavery”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ricardo Esteban Vega Le\u00f3n, in his dissertation, \u201cCapitalist Abolitionism: Racial Capitalism After the End of Slavery,\u201d examines the legacies of liberal ideologies of empire and anti-slavery across imperial spaces in the Americas and the Caribbean. In this important work, Vega Le\u00f3n argues that the end of enslavement wasn’t the end of plantation or racial capitalism, but rather, furthered its globalization through the extra-economic coercive control over workers of various races.<\/p>\n

Vega Le\u00f3n contributes to the literature on racial capitalism by examining a corpus of liberal thinkers beyond the typical canon. He develops a conception of capitalist abolitionism to explain how the political-economic critiques of enslaved labor and emancipation projects of J.E. Cairnes, Harriet Martineau, Herman Merivale, Jos\u00e9 Antonio Saco, Adam Smith, and Alexis de Tocqueville ideologically and materially reproduced dynamics of racial capitalism. He also examines liberal political economists\u2019 subjection of multiple groups of racialized workers, including Black, Chinese, Indian, and white laborers. To create a free labor force in the British and French Caribbean, Cuba, and the U.S. South, Vega Le\u00f3n argues, capitalist abolitionists sought to keep workers of all races separate from the land so as to force them to earn their sustenance by continuing to work for planters in exchange for low wages, and to compel freed women to comply with a gendered division of reproductive labor. Crucially, Vega Le\u00f3n identifies the role of state power and ideologies of private property and free labor in these processes of post-emancipation primitive accumulation, resulting in the dispossession and coercive exploitation of formerly enslaved laborers.<\/p>\n

Vega Le\u00f3n relates this historical and ideological work to contemporary debates among libertarian thinkers and questions of historiography and cultural memory, articulating how the relationship between liberalism and enslavement reverberates in the present. Contemporary libertarian thinkers proclaim that liberalism is inherently anti-slavery, but this work details the limits and tensions within liberal anti-slavery thought and politics. In all, Vega Le\u00f3n\u2019s work is critically oriented, historically rigorous, and with contemporary import, making it well-suited for the Bronner Award.<\/p>\n

Past Recipients<\/strong><\/p>\n

2024: <\/strong>Be Stone, The City University of New York<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

2023: <\/strong>Candice Travis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst<\/p>\n

2022:<\/strong> Lahoma Thomas, Toronto Metropolitan University<\/p>\n

2021:<\/strong> Matt York, University College Cork<\/p>\n

2020: <\/strong>Lucas Pinheiro, University of Chicago
\n“Factories of Modernity: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Racial Politics of Historical Capitalism,” University of Chicago, 2019
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

2019: <\/b>Igor Shoikhedbrod, University of Toronto
\n“Rights Discourse and Economic Domination: Thinking Beyond the Narrow Horizon of Liberal Justice,” University of Toronto, 2018<\/p>\n

2018:\u00a0<\/b>Rafael Khachaturian, Indiana University
\n“Discipline, Knowledge, and Critique: Marxist Theory and the Revival of the State in American Political Science, 1968-1989.” Indiana University, 2017<\/p>\n

2017:\u00a0<\/b>Kevin Funk, Spring Hill College
\n“Between National Attachments, Rooted Transnationalism, and Borderless Utopias: Searching for Imagined Communities in Latin America’s Booming Economic Relations with the Arab World.” University of Florida, 2016<\/p>\n

2016:\u00a0<\/b>Dean Snyder, Antioch College
\n“Commercial Capital and the Political Economy of Agricultural Overproduction.” Syracuse University, 2015<\/p>\n

Additional Recipients \u00bb
\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation Award For an outstanding Political Science dissertation finished within the previous year of the APSA Meeting, which exemplifies the commitment to use scholarship in the struggle to make the study of political science relevant to building a more democratic and egalitarian economic, social, and political order. 2026 Nomination Deadline: April 1st, … <\/p>\n

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