UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are several of our July 2024 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Ori Burton
25th Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize, Finalist
Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A & M University
MAAH Stone Book Award Shortlist 2024
Museum of African American History
Orisanmi Burton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University.
Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt
Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.
W. Joseph Campbell
Sidney Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement 2024
American Journalism Historians Association
W. Joseph Campbell is an American writer, historian, and media critic who is the author of six other books, including the award-winning Getting It Wrong: Debunking the Greatest Myths in American Journalism.
Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections, Updated Edition
Campbell’s most recent book Lost in a Gallup tells the story of polling flops and failures in presidential elections since 1936. Polls do go bad, as outcomes in 2020, 2016, 2012, 2004, and 2000 all remind us. This updated edition includes a new chapter and conclusion that address the 2020 polling surprise and considers whether polls will get it right in 2024.
Getting It Wrong: Debunking the Greatest Myths in American Journalism
Many of American journalism’s best-known and most cherished stories are exaggerated, dubious, or apocryphal. They are media-driven myths, and they attribute to the news media and their practitioners far more power and influence than they truly exert. In Getting It Wrong, writer and scholar W. Joseph Campbell confronts and dismantles prominent media-driven myths, describing how they can feed stereotypes, distort understanding about the news media, and deflect blame from policymakers. Campbell debunks the notions that the Washington Post’s Watergate reporting brought down Richard M. Nixon’s corrupt presidency, that Walter Cronkite’s characterization of the Vietnam War in 1968 shifted public opinion against the conflict, and that William Randolph Hearst vowed to “furnish the war” against Spain in 1898. This expanded second edition includes a new preface and new chapters about the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, the haunting Napalm Girl photograph of the Vietnam War, and bogus quotations driven by the Internet and social media.
Summer Gray
Environmental Sociology Outstanding Publication Award, Honorable Mention
American Sociological Association Section on Environmental Sociology
Summer Gray is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In the Shadow of the Seawall: Coastal Injustice and the Dilemma of Placekeeping
In the Shadow of the Seawall journeys to the low-lying lands of Guyana and the Maldives to grapple with the existential dilemma of seawalls alongside struggles to resist displacement. With the gathering momentum of ocean instability wrought by centuries of injustice, seawalls have become objects of conflict and negotiation, around which human struggles for power and resistance collide. Through stories of colonial ruination and green seawalls, the concept of placekeeping emerges—a justice-oriented framework for addressing adaptation and the global dangers of coastal disruption at the front lines of climate change. Drawing on ethnographic observation and interviews, Gray shows how seawalls are entrenched in relationships of power and entangled in processes of making and keeping place.
Daniel Jaffee
Environmental Sociology Outstanding Publication Award 2024
American Sociological Association Section on Environmental Sociology
Daniel Jaffee is Professor of Sociology at Portland State University. His previous book, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival, received the C. Wright Mills Book Award. Learn more at www.danieljaffee.net.
Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice
Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, residents, public officials, and other participants in controversies ranging from bottled water’s role in unsafe tap water crises to groundwater extraction for bottling in rural communities, Daniel Jaffee asks what this commodity’s meteoric growth means for social inequality, sustainability, and the human right to water. Unbottled profiles campaigns to reclaim the tap and addresses the challenges of ending dependence on packaged water in places where safe water is not widely accessible. Clear and compelling, it assesses the prospects for the movements fighting plastic water and working to ensure water justice for all.
Julia Sarreal
Rorabaugh Book Prize 2024
Alcohol and Drug History Society
Julia J.S. Sarreal is Associate Professor at Arizona State University and author of The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History. She has a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University and teaches classes on Latin American History and Latin American Studies. Dr. Sarreal first tried yerba mate as a Peace Corps volunteer in Curuguaty, Paraguay. Her intellectual interest in the beverage was sparked while living in Buenos Aires and working on her dissertation about the Guaraní missions.
Yerba Mate: The Drink That Shaped a Nation
Yerba Mate is the first book to explore the extraordinary history of this iconic beverage in Argentina from the precolonial period to the present. From yerba mate’s Indigenous origins to its ubiquity during the colonial era, from its association with rural people and the poor in the late nineteenth century to its resurgence in the last years of the twentieth century, Julia Sarreal meticulously documents yerba mate’s consumption, production, and cultural importance over time. Yerba Mate is the definitive history of this popular beverage and social practice, and it tells a fascinating story about race, culture, and how a drink helped forge the national identity of one of the world’s most dynamic countries.
Gunja Sengupta and Awam Amkpa
Bentley Book Prize 2024
World History Association
Paul Lovejoy Book Prize 2024
Journal of Global Slavery (JGS)
Gunja SenGupta is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is author of From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840–1918.
Awam Amkpa is Professor of Drama and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and Dean of Arts and Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is author of Theater and Postcolonial Desires.
Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire
In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, “free labor” experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa profile transnational human rights campaigns. They show how the discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, revealing the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with liberal contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a “cotton queen” and courtesans, and fugitive “slaves” and concubines populates the pages, fleshing out on a granular level the interface between the personal, domestic, and international politics of “slavery in the East” in the age of empire. By extending the transnational framework of US slavery and abolition histories beyond the Atlantic, Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa recover vivid stories and prompt reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency.