Mary Kay Vaughan Honored By The Conference Of Latin American History

Professor emerita of history honored for her distinguished service to the field.

Mary Kay Vaughan, professor emerita of history in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, has won the Award for Distinguished Service from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH). Vaughan is lauded for her original research on the politics of Mexican education and her commitment to Mexico’s downtrodden.

The Award for Distinguished Service to the profession was established in 1969 by the CLAH General Committee and is annually conferred on a person whose career in scholarship, teaching, publishing, librarianship, institutional development or other fields demonstrates significant contributions to the advancement of the study of Latin American history in the United States. 

Vaughan is the author of “Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940,” which received the Herbert Eugene Bolton Prize for most outstanding book in Latin American history in 1997 and the Bryce Wood Award from the Latin American Studies Association for best book on Latin America published in English. She is also the author of “The State, Education and Social Class in Mexico, 1880-1928,” which was praised for its nuanced and sympathetic analysis of how class, gender and ethnicity shape Mexican teachers’ relationship to society and the government. Vaughn has co-edited several influential volumes, including “Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850-1990: Creating Spaces, Shaping Transitions,” “School and Society in The Cardenist Period” (“Escuela y sociedad en el periodo cardenista”), “The Eagle and the Virgin: Cultural Revolution and National Identity in Mexico, 1920-1940,” and “Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics and Power in Modern Mexico.” Vaughan’s most recent book is “Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation,” which examines 1960’s youth culture in Mexico City and the dissolution of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) through the life and politics of a relatively unknown painter.

Vaughn has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars and the Social Science Research Council. She also received grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright Hays Program and the Illinois Humanities Council. 

Vaughn earned her doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin and joined the Department of History at the University of Maryland in 2000.