Daniela Formosa and Gabriella Grima, who recently graduated with a BA Honours in History from the University of Malta, have been jointly awarded the Farsons Foundation Prize for Best History Honours Thesis for 2017.
Formosa’s thesis was on ‘The 1836 Austin and Lewis Commission: An Analytical Review of Private Correspondences and Reports’. The Commission’s recommendations, which were formulated after taking stock of a wide range of aspects of life and governance in Malta at the time, set the tone of British administration of the island for the next 40 years.
Grima’s thesis, entitled ‘Identifying Patterns of Crime in Gozo: A Look into the Police Occurrences of the Second World War’, involved an investigation of hitherto unseen police records and threw fresh light on Gozo’s social history of during the war.
The winners were selected by the History Department and the prize was presented by Michael Farrugia, a director at Simonds Farsons Cisk and a trustee on the Farsons Foundation’s board, in the presence of foundation secretary Kenneth Pullicino at the new Farsons Administration Building in Mrieħel.
The prize was set up in 2014 as part of a memorandum of understanding between SFC, the foundation and the University of Malta. The agreement was renewed last year for a further three years.