A post by Peter Jordens

The 2015 Cola Debrot Prize, Curaçao’s most prestigious national award in the area of culture and the arts, has been awarded to anthropologist Rose Mary Allen. She recently received the award from the Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports, Ms. Irene Dick. Allen has won the Prize for her valuable contribution to and achievement in the sciences. The prestigious Cola Debrot Prize is named after writer, physician, diplomat and philosopher Nicolaas ‘Cola’ Debrot (1902-1981). The Prize has been awarded since 1983. It consists of a gold button, certificate, sum of money, and the jury report.

Two weeks ago Allen was knighted in the Netherlands Order of Orange-Nassau. In 2011 she won Curaçao’s Boeli van Leeuwen Prize. She is the first woman to win the Cola Debrot Prize in the category of the sciences.

Allen has dedicated herself to research on the social history of Curaçao and of Afro-Curaçaoans and other neglected social groups in particular. Her areas of special interest have been emancipation, oral history, identity, migration, and gender. Allen is the author or co-author of several books and has published myriad scholarly articles in international journals. She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Curaçao, the Police Academy, the Institute for Education in Nursing, the University of the West Indies at St Augustine, and the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. In recent years Allen has been passing her love of research on to younger generations and has been involved in many community projects. She is presently assisting the Ministry of Culture in preparing a new cultural policy.

For more about Rose Mary Allen, see our previous post Rose Mary Allen receives Boeli van Leeuwen Prize.

Compiled from personal information, the offline news sources Amigoe and TeleCuraçao, as well as http://loopcuracao.com/2015/05/05/dr-rose-mary-allen-ganado-premio-cola-debrot-2015, http://loopcuracao.com/2015/05/05/premio-cola-debrot-2015-den-loop, http://www.dolfijnfm.com/cola-debrotprijs-naar-rose-mary-allen, and http://www.antilliaansdagblad.com/index.php/nieuws-menu/11030-rose-mary-allen-krijgt-cola-debrotprijs. The photo is from http://loopcuracao.com.