UC Press December Award Winners
Lia Brozgal
Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work 2023
Modern Language Association
Lia Brozgal is Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris (17 October 1961).
A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean
A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. The present translation makes this unique collection available to an English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world.
Shannon Cram
Gregory Bateson Book Prize Honorable Mention 2024
Society for Cultural Anthropology
Julian Steward Award 2024
Anthropology and Environment Society
Shannon Cram is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility
What does it mean to reckon with a contaminated world? In Unmaking the Bomb, Shannon Cram considers the complex social politics of this question and the regulatory infrastructures designed to answer it. Blending history, ethnography, and memoir, she investigates remediation efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in Washington State. Home to the majority of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste and its largest environmental cleanup, Hanford is tasked with managing toxic materials that will long outlast the United States and its institutional capacities. Cram examines the embodied uncertainties and structural impossibilities integral to that endeavor. In particular, this lyrical book engages in a kind of narrative contamination, toggling back and forth between cleanup’s administrative frames and the stories that overspill them. It spends time with the statistical people that inhabit cleanup’s metrics and models and the nonstatistical people that live with their effects. And, in the process, it explores the uneven social relations that make toxicity a normative condition.
Jatin Dua
Monsoon Book Prize in Political Economy Honorable Mention 2024]
German University of Technology in Oman/GSU
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.
Alex Edmans
Non-Obvious Book Awards Longlist 2024
Non-Obvious Book Awards
Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. His TED talk "What to Trust in a Post-Truth World" has been viewed two million times; he has also spoken at the World Economic Forum, Davos, and in the UK Parliament. In 2013, he was awarded tenure at the Wharton School, and in 2021, he was named MBA Professor of the Year by Poets&Quants. Edmans writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review. His first book, Grow the Pie, was a Financial Times Book of the Year. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
May Contain Lies
How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It
In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples—from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death—Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof.
Freddy Foks
Constance Blackwell Prize 2024
International Society for Intellectual History
Freddy Foks is Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. He is a historian of modern Britain and its empire.
Participant Observers
Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain
Social anthropology was at the forefront of debates about culture, society, and economic development in the British Empire. This book explores the discipline's rise in the interwar period, crisis amid decolonization, and ironic reemergence in the postwar metropole. Across the humanities and social sciences, activists and scholars used anthropological concepts forged in empire to rethink British society at midcentury. Participant Observers shows how colonial anthropology helped define the social imagination of postimperial Britain. Part institutional history of the discipline's formation, part cultural history of its impact, this is the first account of social anthropology's pivotal role in Britain's intellectual culture.
Amanda Marie Lanzillo
BASAS Book Prize 2024, Shortlist
British Association of South Asian Studies
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.
Ryo Morimoto
Julian Steward Award Honorable Mention 2024
Anthropology and Environment Society
Ryo Morimoto is a first-generation college student and scholar from Japan and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His scholarly work addresses the planetary impacts of our past and present engagements with nuclear things.
Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Gray Zone
“There is a nuclear ghost in Minamisōma.” This is how one resident describes a mysterious experience following the 2011 nuclear fallout in coastal Fukushima. Investigating the nuclear ghost among the graying population, Ryo Morimoto encounters radiation’s shapeshifting effects. What happens if state authorities, scientific experts, and the public disagree about the extent and nature of the harm caused by the accident? In one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of coastal Fukushima written in English, Nuclear Ghost tells the stories of a diverse group of residents who aspire to live and die well in their now irradiated homes. Their determination to recover their land, cultures, and histories for future generations provides a compelling case study for reimagining relationality and accountability in the ever-atomizing world.
Táhirih Motazedian
SMT Emerging Scholar Book Award 2024
Society for Music Theory
Táhirih Motazedian is Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College. Before her career in music theory, she worked for NASA as a planetary scientist and mission operations specialist.
Key Constellations
Interpreting Tonality in Film
Key is one of the simplest building blocks of music and is among the foundational properties of a work’s musical identity—so why isn’t it a standard parameter in discussing film music? Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film is the first book to investigate film soundtracks—including original scoring, preexisting music, and sound effects—through the lens of large-scale tonality. Exploring compelling analytical examples from numerous popular films, Táhirih Motazedian shows how key and pitch analysis of film music can reveal hidden layers of narrative meaning, giving readers exciting new ways to engage with their favorite films and soundtracks.
Sean Nesselrode Moncada
Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book on Venezuela 2024
Latin American Studies Associatiion, Section on Venezuelan Studies (SVS)
Sean Nesselrode Moncada is Associate Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela
Venezuela’s turbulent twentieth century saw boom and bust as the former Spanish colony transformed into a major postwar cultural player. In this sweeping study of visual and material production, Sean Nesselrode Moncada explores the integral relationship between the global oil industry and the celebrated rise of geometric abstraction, kinetic art, and modern architecture in midcentury Venezuela. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. An innovative, transdisciplinary reevaluation of Venezuelan modernism, Refined Material reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another.
Michaela Soyer
Outstanding Book Award 2025
Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences
Michaela Soyer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College. She is author of A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America and Lost Childhoods: Poverty, Trauma, and Violent Crime in the Post-Welfare Era.
The Price of Freedom
Criminalization and the Management of Outsiders in Germany and the United States
Seeking to shed light on how we might end mass incarceration, The Price of Freedom compares the histories and goals of the American and German justice systems. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with incarcerated young men in the United States and Germany, Michaela Soyer argues that the apparent relative lenience of the German criminal justice system is actually founded on the violent enforcement of cultural homogeneity at the hands of the German welfare state. Demonstrating how both societies have constructed a racialized underclass of outsiders over time, this book emphasizes that criminal justice reformers in the United States need to move beyond European models in order to build a truly just, diverse society.
Jim Sykes and Julia Suzanne Byl
Monsoon Book Prize in Archaeology and Anthropology 2024
German University of Technology in Oman/GSU
Jim Sykes is Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka.
Julia Byl is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta and author of Antiphonal Histories: Resonant Pasts in the Toba Batak Musical Present.
Sounding the Indian Ocean
Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Seascape
Sounding the Indian Ocean is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be “heard” outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the history and anthropology of the region. Challenging the area studies paradigm—which has long cast Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as separate musical cultures—the book shows how music both forms and crosses boundaries in the Indian Ocean world.
Naomi Weiss
Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit 2024
Society for Classical Studies
Naomi Weiss is Professor of Classics at Harvard University. She is author of The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater.
Seeing Theater
The Phenomenology of Classical Greek Drama
This is the first book to approach the visuality of ancient Greek drama through the lens of theater phenomenology. Gathering evidence from tragedy, comedy, satyr play, and vase painting, Naomi Weiss argues that, from its very beginnings, Greek theater in the fifth century BCE was understood as a complex interplay of actuality and virtuality. Classical drama frequently exposes and interrogates potential viewing experiences within the theatron—literally, “the place for seeing.” Weiss shows how, in so doing, it demands distinctive modes of engagement from its audiences. Examining plays and pottery with attention to the instability and ambiguity inherent in visual perception, Seeing Theater provides an entirely new model for understanding this ancient art form.