Ofelia Rey Castelao has been awarded the 2022 Spanish National History Prize for her work ‘El vuelo corto. Mujeres y migraciones en la Edad Moderna’ (University of Santiago de Compostela).
TDB keeps you informed. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The prize, awarded by the Ministry of Culture and Sport, is worth 20,000 euros.
The jury singled out her work ‘El vuelo corto. Mujeres y migraciones en la Edad Moderna’ “for being a rigorous investigation with a diversity of historical sources that offers a comprehensive view of the migrations of women in the Modern Age: intra-peninsular, transoceanic, those who did so as free, semi-free or captive people or as exiles…”.
In addition, the jury singled out this book “for its study of the causes and transcendental demographic, social, labour, economic, cultural and moral consequences, while at the same time offering an examination of the other side of the phenomenon, the consequences of male migrations on the women who stayed behind. For its outstanding contribution to Spanish historiography and for its enormous social value, as well as for its analysis of a complex reality, that of migration, of undeniable topicality. Ofelia Rey’s work is an example of interdisciplinarity and impeccable methodology, with an up-to-date approach to the gender perspective of migratory processes in Modern Spain”.
Biography
Ofelia Rey Castelao (Arnois, A Estrada, 1956) has been a Professor of Modern History in the Faculty of Geography and History at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) since 2002. She graduated from this University in 1978 and obtained her PhD in 1984, in both cases with an Extraordinary Prize. From 1978 she was a grant holder and assistant lecturer, and in 1986 she became a full professor. She has directed fifteen projects at different levels – integrated actions, regional and national projects -, seven doctoral theses and more than twenty undergraduate and postgraduate theses, and she is the coordinator of the USC’s ‘Modern History’ research group.
For fifteen years she has been the director of the journal ‘Obradoiro de Historia Moderna’. She is a member of the scientific committee of academic journals such as ‘Tiempos Modernos’ (Complutense University of Madrid), ‘Investigaciones Históricas’ (University of Valladolid), ‘Contrahistorias. La otra mirada de Clío’ (UNAM, Mexico), ‘Historia Social’, ‘Trocadero’ (University of Cadiz), ‘Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez’, ‘Estudis’ (University of Valencia), among many others. She is also a member of the advisory board of the ‘Biblioteca de Historia’ of the CSIC.
She has been vice president of the Spanish Foundation of Modern History (2006-2008) and is a member of the Bureau de la Commission Internationale de Dèmographie Historique (elected in Sydney in July 2005). In 2006 she was invited by the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she was Director of Studies. From January 2006 to October 2009 she was the coordinator of History and Art at the National Agency for Evaluation and Prospective.
Among her published books are ‘Historia de las mujeres en Galicia: (siglos XVI al XIX)’ (2009); ‘El reto de romper un techo de cristal en el siglo XXI: mujeres y Ciencias Humanas en el sistema académico y científico español’ (2019) and ‘El vuelo corto. Women and migrations in the Modern Age’ (2021).
She has collaborated in chapters and articles, as well as presented papers at national and international conferences; she has published in prestigious journals such as ‘Annales de Démographie Historique’, ‘XVIIe Siècle’, ‘Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez’, ‘Manuscrits’, ‘Pedralbes’, ‘Stvdia Historica’, among others. In 2011 she was awarded the María Josefa Wonenburger Prize for Research, granted by the Secretary for Equality of the Xunta de Galicia.