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University of California Press
Oct 01 2025

UC Press September Award Winners

UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are our September 2025 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi 

ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award (History) 2025 Winner 
American Council of Learned Societies

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Archipelago of Resettlement
Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine

What happens when refugees encounter Indigenous sovereignty struggles in the countries of their resettlement? 

From April to November 1975, the US military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on the unincorporated territory of Guam; from 1977 to 1979, the State of Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi analyzes these two cases to theorize what she calls the refugee settler condition: the fraught positionality of refugee subjects whose resettlement in a settler colonial state is predicated on the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. This groundbreaking book explores two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire, examining how the Vietnam War is linked to the US military buildup in Guam and unwavering support of Israel, and second, corresponding archipelagos of trans-Indigenous resistance, tracing how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the Vietnamese refugee figure. Considering distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, Gandhi offers tools for imagining emergent forms of decolonial solidarity between refugee settlers and Indigenous peoples. 

A free open access ebook is available here
 


Matthew Morrison 

Royal Musical Association Monograph Prize Honorable Mention 2025
Royal Musical Association

Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a musicologist, violinist, and Associate Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Blacksound
Making Race and Popular Music in the United States

Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
 
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

The book originated from an article Morrison wrote in JAMS in 2019, "Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.


Ieva Jusionyte

Mass Book Award (Nonfiction) Honors 2025
Massachusetts Center for the Book

Ieva Jusionyte is an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University. A former paramedic and Harvard Radcliffe and Fulbright fellow, she is the author of the award-winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border.

Exit Wounds
How America's Guns Fuel Violence across the Border

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico.

An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax US gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves together the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. Based on years of fieldwork, Exit Wounds expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with US complicity in violence on both sides of the border.


Hadar Aviram and Chad Goerzen

Michael J. Hindelang Book Award 2025
American Society of Criminology

Hadar Aviram is Thomas E. Miller Professor at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She is author of Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment and Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole and coeditor of The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice.
 
Chad Goerzen is a Senior Research Scientist with the US Army Rotorcraft Project.

Fester
Carceral Permeability and California's COVID-19 Correctional Disaster

The mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in California’s prisons stands out as the state’s worst-ever medical catastrophe in a carceral setting. Fester offers a cultural history of this correctional disaster through first-person accounts, courtroom observations, policy documents, and years of carefully collected quantitative data. Bearing witness to the immense suffering wrought on people behind bars through dehumanization, fear, and ignorance, Fester explains how carceral cruelty also threatens the health and well-being of all Californians. This book stands as a monument to the brave coalition of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, along with activists, doctors, journalists, and lawyers, who fought to shed light on one of the darkest times in the Golden State’s correctional system.


Hannah Frank

ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award (Literary Studies) 2025
American Council of Learned Societies

Hannah Frank (1984–2017) was Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been published in Critical Quarterly and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and she contributed a chapter to A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood.

Daniel Morgan (Editor) is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema.

Frame by Frame
A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons

In this beautifully written and deeply researched study, Hannah Frank provides an original way to understand American animated cartoons from the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960). In the pre-digital age of the twentieth century, the making of cartoons was mechanized and standardized: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called “cels”) and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and technicians. In order to see the art, labor, and technology of cel animation, Frank slows cartoons down to look frame by frame, finding hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image. What emerges is both a methodology and a highly original account of an art formed on the assembly line.


Jamie Fader

Outstanding Contribution Award 2025
ASC Division of Developmental and Life Course Criminology

Jamie J. Fader is a sociologist and Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Temple University. She is the author of Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth.

On Shifting Ground
Constructing Manhood on the Margins

On Shifting Ground examines how it is to become a man in a place and time defined by economic contraction and carceral expansion. Jamie J. Fader draws on in-depth interviews with a racially diverse sample of Philadelphia's millennial men to analyze the key tensions that organize their lives: isolation versus connectedness, stability versus "drama," hope versus fear, and stigma and shame versus positive, masculine affirmation. In the unfamiliar cultural landscape of contemporary adult masculinity, these men strive to define themselves in terms of what they can accomplish despite negative labels, as well as seeking to avoid "becoming a statistic" in the face of endemic risk.
 


Amanda Marie Lanzillo

South Asia Muslim Studies Association Book Prize 2025
South Asian Muslim Studies Association

Amanda Lanzillo is Lecturer in South Asian History at Brunel University London.

Pious Labor
Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans began publicly asserting the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions “from below.” Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor examines colonial-era social and technological changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.


 


Darshana Sreedhar Mini

Asian/Pacific American Communication Studies Division/Caucus Outstanding Book Award 2025
NCA Asian/Pacific American Communication Studies Division/Caucus

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and coeditor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene.

Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India

In the 1990s, India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre’s circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form negotiate their social lives. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.


 


Masha Salazkina

Heldt Prize Best Book in New and Innovative Scholarship Honorable Mention 2025
Association for Women in Slavic Studies

Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize 2025
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)

Masha Salazkina is Concordia Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico and a coeditor of Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures.

Romancing Yesenia
How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture

This book follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance Yesenia. The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes Yesenia’s unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and of the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing "Yesenia" argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media.