UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are several of our recent award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Nadya Bair
2021 PROSE Award in Media and Cultural Studies
Nadya Bair is a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art.
The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market
Based on unprecedented archival research, The Decisive Network unravels Magnum’s mythologies to offer a new history of what it meant to shoot, edit, and sell news images after World War II.
Nadya Bair shows that between the 1940s and 1960s, Magnum expanded the human-interest story to global dimensions while bringing the aesthetic of news pictures into new markets. Bridging art history, media studies, cultural history, and the history of communication, The Decisive Network transforms our understanding of the photographic profession and the global circulation of images in the predigital world.
Houri Berberian
2020 Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prizes for Excellence in Armenian Studies
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research
Houri Berberian is Professor of History, Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies, and Director of the Armenian Studies Program at UC Irvine.
Roving Revolutionaries:
Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds
Three of the formative revolutions that shook the early twentieth-century world occurred almost simultaneously in regions bordering each other. Though the Russian, Iranian, and Young Turk Revolutions all exploded between 1904 and 1911, they have never been studied through their linkages until now. Roving Revolutionaries probes the interconnected aspects of these three revolutions through the involvement of the Armenian revolutionaries—minorities in all of these empires—whose movements and participation within and across frontiers tell us a great deal about the global transformations that were taking shape. Exploring the geographical and ideological boundary crossings that occurred, Houri Berberian’s archivally grounded analysis of the circulation of revolutionaries, ideas, and print tells the story of peoples and ideologies in upheaval and collaborating with each other, and in so doing it illuminates our understanding of revolutions and movements.
Andrea S. Boyles
Best Book
2020 Media for a Just Society Award Winners
Andrea S. Boyles is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Lindenwood University, Belleville. She is a feminist, race scholar, and the author of Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort.
You Can’t Stop the Revolution:
Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America
You Can’t Stop the Revolution is a vivid participant ethnography conducted from inside of Ferguson protests as the Black Lives Matter movement catapulted onto the global stage. Sociologist Andrea S. Boyles offers an everyday montage of protests, social ties, and empowerment that coalesced to safeguard black lives while igniting unprecedented twenty-first-century resistance. Focusing on neighborhood crime prevention and contentious black citizen–police interactions in the context of preserving black lives, this book examines how black citizens work to combat disorder, crime, and police conflict. Boyles offers an insider’s analysis of cities like Ferguson, where a climate of indifference leaves black neighborhoods vulnerable to conflict, where black lives are seemingly expendable, and where black citizens are held responsible for their own oppression. You Can’t Stop the Revolution serves as a reminder that community empowerment is still possible in neighborhoods experiencing police brutality and interpersonal violence.
Jatin Dua
2020 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award
Association for Africanist Anthropology
Jatin Dua is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
Captured at Sea:
Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean
How is it possible for six men to take a Liberian-flagged oil tanker hostage and negotiate a huge pay out for the return of its crew and 2.2 million barrels of crude oil? In his gripping new book, Jatin Dua answers this question by exploring the unprecedented upsurge in maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia in the twenty-first century. Taking the reader inside pirate communities in Somalia, onboard multinational container ships, and within insurance offices in London, Dua connects modern day pirates to longer histories of trade and disputes over protection. In our increasingly technological world, maritime piracy represents not only an interruption, but an attempt to insert oneself within the world of oceanic trade. Captured at Sea moves beyond the binaries of legal and illegal to illustrate how the seas continue to be key sites of global regulation, connectivity, and commerce today.
Jessica Lynn Graham
Warren Dean Memorial Prize 2021
The Conference on Latin American History
Jessica Lynn Graham is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.
Shifting the Meaning of Democracy:
Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil
This book offers a historical analysis of one of the most striking and dramatic transformations to take place in Brazil and the United States during the twentieth century—the redefinition of the concepts of nation and democracy in racial terms. The multilateral political debates that occurred between 1930 and 1945 pushed and pulled both states towards more racially inclusive political ideals and nationalisms. Both countries utilized cultural production to transmit these racial political messages. At times working collaboratively, Brazilian and U.S. officials deployed the concept of “racial democracy” as a national security strategy, one meant to suppress the existential threats perceived to be posed by World War II and by the political agendas of communists, fascists, and blacks. Consequently, official racial democracy was limited in its ability to address racial inequities in the United States and Brazil. Shifting the Meaning of Democracy helps to explain the historical roots of a contemporary phenomenon: the coexistence of widespread antiracist ideals with enduring racial inequality.
Brian R. Jacobson
2021 Best Edited Collection Award
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space.
In the Studio
Visual Creation and Its Material Environments
Studios are, at once, material environments and symbolic forms, sites of artistic creation and physical labor, and nodes in networks of resource circulation. They are architectural places that generate virtual spaces—worlds built to build worlds. Yet, despite being icons of corporate identity, studios have faded into the background of critical discourse and into the margins of film and media history. In response, In the Studio demonstrates that when we foreground these worlds, we gain new insights into moving-image culture and the dynamics that quietly mark the worlds on our screens. Spanning the twentieth century and moving globally, this unique collection tells new stories about studio icons—Pinewood, Cinecittà, Churubusco, and CBS—as well as about the experimental workplaces of filmmakers and artists from Aleksandr Medvedkin to Charles and Ray Eames and Hollis Frampton.
Brendan McQuade
Critical Criminology Book Award 2020
ASC Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice
Paul Sweezy Marxist Sociology Book Award 2020
American Sociological Association
Runner-up, Surveillance Studies Network Book Award 2020
Brendan McQuade is Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Southern Maine.
Pacifying the Homeland
Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision
The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers.” These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates have criticized them for failing on this account. So why do these security systems persist? Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers, and reveals a broader shift away from mass incarceration and toward a more surveillance- and police-intensive system of social regulation.
Provided with unprecedented access to domestic intelligence centers, Brendan McQuade uncovers how the institutionalization of intelligence fusion enables decarceration without fully addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. The result is a startling analysis that contributes to the debates on surveillance, mass incarceration, and policing and challenges readers to see surveillance, policing, mass incarceration, and the security state in an entirely new light.
Juliet Schor
Management & Workplace Culture Book of the Year
Porchlight Business Book Awards
Juliet B. Schor is an economist and sociologist, and a New York Times best-selling author. She teaches at Boston College and cochairs the board of directors of the Better Future Project.
After the Gig:
How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible.
Jessica L. Thompson and Ana K. Houseal
2020 Stewart L. Udall Award
Western National Parks Association
Jessica L. Thompson is Associate Professor in the College of Business at Northern Michigan University.
Ana K. Houseal is Associate Professor and Science Outreach Educator in the Science and Mathematics Teaching Center at the University of Wyoming.
America’s Largest Classroom:
What We Learn from Our National Parks
America’s Largest Classrooms offers insight and practical advice for improving educational outreach at national parks as well as suggestions for classroom educators on how to meaningfully incorporate parks into their curricula. Via a wide collection of case studies—ranging from addressing inclusivity at parks and public lands to teaching about science and social issues—this book illustrates innovations and solutions that will be of interest to nature interpreters, outdoor educators, and policy makers, as well as professors in the sciences writ large.