Congratulations to School of Languages and Cultures Honours graduate Jessica Cockerill who has been awarded the prestigious Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA) prize for the Best Honours Dissertation for 2021.
Jess’ thesis titled ‘Descargas de responsabilidad en el Códice Florentino’ (Disclaimers in the Florentine Codex) focuses on the use of disclaimers in Bernardino de Sahagún contributions to the Florentine Codex and how they are used to justify or condemn Indigenous language, culture, religion and knowledge.
Jess said after submitting her thesis and graduating with first-class Honours during the initial lockdown in 2020 she was excited to have her hard work recognised by AILASA.
“Completing my Honours during the onset of the pandemic had its challenges, however I was very lucky to be part of a supportive Honours cohort and owe a lot to their encouragement and understanding,” Jess said.
“Particularly the tutorship in critical discourse analysis and encouragement to dig deeper that I received from Dr Sol Rojas-Lizana.”
Jess first became interested in Mexican history following a trip to Mexico in 2018, after which she approached Senior Lecturer Dr Rojas-Lizana who had taught Jess in her third year of studying a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Linguistics and Spanish.
“It’s a fascinating country with so many different cultural influences, I think you could spend your whole life researching it and still feel like you’ve only covered the tip of the iceberg,” she said.
“After approaching Dr Rojas-Lizana she had some ideas about studying documents from colonial Mexico and Peru, so we started working together on this project.”
As the Florentine Codex details most of what is known today about the Nahua peoples (more commonly known as the Aztecs) it is important to study the manuscript from different perspectives.
“The Codex was written in collaboration with Spanish friars and Nahua scholars, so studying the perspective of Sahagún, the principal friar that the text is attributed to, is very important to understand what that collaborative relationship was like.
“Through my research I learned that in the midst of power imbalances, violence and dispossession, there were some incredible stories of Indigenous resistance.
“Re-analysing historical documents from colonial periods reveals that there were, and still are, multiple perspectives of any given event, which I think can help us in working towards reconciliation,” she said.
Jess and Dr Rojas-Lizana have submitted a co-authored article for the journal Bulletin of Spanish Studies based on her thesis.
“As Jess and I share a passion for research and the exploration of different ways of knowing and doing, it was a pleasure to be part of her journey to become a researcher,” Dr Rojas-Lizana said.
While her career has taken her in a different direction, currently working as a Learning Designer at UQ, Jess plans to return to research on Mexican history in the future.
