Gladys McCormick, the Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations at Syracuse University in New York, has received the 2026 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association. She was honored for her book, The Last Door: A History of Torture in Mexico’s War Against Subversives (University of California Press, 2025).
Leveraging research from interviews and declassified documents, Dr. McCormick’s award-winning monograph examines how the Mexican government used torture to suppress dissent in the 1970s, providing insights into the abuse and systemic failures that have contributed to today’s security crisis in Mexico.
A professor of history, Dr. McCormick currently serves as associate dean for strategic initiatives in Syracuse’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is a senior research associate with the Maxwell School’s Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration, as well as the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean. She previously served a six-year term as a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
In addition to The Last Door, Dr. McCormick is the author of The Logic of Compromise in Mexico: How the Countryside Was Key to the Emergence of Authoritarianism (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). She is working on another co-authored book regarding the history of drug trafficking in Latin America.
Dr. McCormick is a graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.