2026 Graduate Student Research Prize Recipient

María Belén Portilla Moya,

PhD candidate in the History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

“Making Quito Visible: Cartography, Exploration, and the Production of Geographic Knowledge in the Real Audiencia de Quito"

This essay examines how the Real Audiencia de Quito became territorially intelligible during the eighteenth century through overlapping practices of exploration, missionary travel, scientific inquiry, and cartographic representation. Rather than treating maps as passive reflections of geographic reality, it argues that cartography actively transformed fragmented spatial knowledge into increasingly coherent territorial visions. The essay places two interconnected cartographic moments in dialogue: Samuel Fritz’s 1707 mapping of the Amazon River system and the mid-eighteenth-century cartography of Pedro Vicente Maldonado, later refined and circulated by Jean-Baptiste d’Anville. Fritz’s map reveals a geography structured through rivers, missionary mobility, Indigenous settlements, and environmental encounter, while Maldonado’s cartography increasingly organized space through measurement, hierarchy, and territorial coherence. This transformation was shaped by Enlightenment science, the French Geodesic Mission, local expertise, and the circulation of geographic knowledge across Atlantic networks. By tracing the movement from travel and observation to measurement, visualization, and circulation, the essay argues that Quito did not simply exist as a coherent territory waiting to be mapped. Cartographic practices participated in making Quito visible and imaginable as a spatial whole.

María Belén Portilla Moya is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on colonial Latin America, with particular emphasis on cartography, territoriality, visual culture, and the production of geographic knowledge. Her dissertation, Mapping Quito: From Colony to Nation, examines the transformation of the Real Audiencia de Quito from a Spanish colonial jurisdiction into the territorial and political center of the Republic of Ecuador. Her work analyzes maps not as passive representations of preexisting territory, but as forms of knowledge that shaped how imperial and early republican actors understood jurisdiction, negotiated boundaries, and imagined political space. Methodologically, she combines close visual analysis of maps with archival research and digital spatial methods. Her research has been supported by the John Carter Brown Library, the Kislak Family Foundation, and the Society for the History of Discoveries. Her broader research contributes to the history of cartography, visual culture, geographic knowledge, and Latin American state formation.

2026 Undergraduate Student Research Prize Recipient 

Tim Stumpf,

Trent University - Peterborough, Ontario

"Dominion of the Carvel - A Medieval Evolution: From Regional Shipbuilding Methods in Europe to the Standardization of Carvel Construction"

Shipbuilding has often been viewed through a lens of linear technological development, with ship construction techniques separated by geography and cultural adaptation. Examining five medieval ships from around northern Europe provides a view into how construction techniques were adapted to regional conditions, economic demands, and changing maritime requirements. The Dyngo Cog (1430 CE), Landfjärden Wreck 5 (c. 1460–80 CE), Newport Medieval Ship (c. 1465 CE), Gribshunden (1490 CE), and Mary Rose (1511 CE) span a period in which clinker, carvel, and hybrid construction methods coexisted across northern Europe. The adoption of carvel construction was neither linear nor uniform, but developed through experimentation, hybridisation, and selective adoption. Mixed construction strategies demonstrate how shipwrights negotiated between established northern practices and emerging frame-first methods, incorporating the advantages of carvel construction while retaining elements of established clinker practice. Evidence from English, Scandinavian, and Hanseatic regions demonstrates that, despite regional differences, northern European shipbuilding gradually converged toward carvel-based practice by the early seventeenth century. Increasing dockyard infrastructure, administrative oversight, and resource management further contributed to the standardisation of carvel construction, reflecting adaptation to the changing economic, environmental, and military demands of late medieval and early modern Europe.

Tim Stumpf is an incoming master’s student in Maritime Studies. He hails from Buckhorn, Ontario, Canada, and completed a joint BA (Hons) in Archaeology and History from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. His historical interests primarily centre on the military and social histories of the Colonial through Post-Confederation periods in British North America, particularly from the 18^th to early 20^th centuries. Within archaeology, Tim’s interests tend to focus on landscapes and seascapes, the cultures and peoples of the Circumpolar North, and archaeological theory and methods. His experience spans public history, marine industries, and archaeology. He has worked as a costumed mid-19^th century historical interpreter at living history museums and spent a dozen years as a crew member aboard a tall ship, plying the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence and the Canadian Maritime coasts, including voyages in the Labrador Sea and circumnavigating Newfoundland. For the past two summer seasons, he has worked as an archaeological field technician for Matrix Heritage, a Canadian CRM company owned and operated by an ECU Maritime Studies alum. Drawing on these experiences, Tim’s research interests centre on maritime seascapes, specifically how maritime cultures perceive and interact with an ever-changing seascape.  When he doesn’t have his head in a book or his focus isn’t occupied with gaming and model-building, Tim can be found hiking around town or trying a new trail, or exploring museums.