UC Press March Award Winners
UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are our March 2025 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Samantha Barbas
Order of the Coif Book Award Finalist 2024
Order of the Coif
Samantha Barbas is Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo School of Law. She is the author of six books on mass media law and history, including The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade and Newsworthy: The Supreme Court Battle over Privacy and Press Freedom.
Actual Malice
Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan
Actual Malice tells the full story of New York Times v. Sullivan, the dramatic case that grew out of segregationists' attempts to quash reporting on the civil rights movement. In its landmark 1964 decision, the Supreme Court held that a public official must prove "actual malice" or reckless disregard of the truth to win a libel lawsuit, providing critical protections for free speech and freedom of the press.
Drawing on previously unexplored sources, including the archives of the New York Times Company and civil rights leaders, Samantha Barbas tracks the saga behind one of the most important First Amendment rulings in history. She situates the case within the turbulent 1960s and the history of the press, alongside striking portraits of the lawyers, officials, judges, activists, editors, and journalists who brought and defended the case. As the Sullivan doctrine faces growing controversy, Actual Malice reminds us of the stakes of the case that shaped American reporting and public discourse as we know it.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Oklahoma Book Award
Oklahoma Center for the Book
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning biographer, essayist, and poet. Her previous titles include the biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer and the poetry collection West : Fire : Archive.
Riding Like the Wind
The Life of Sanora Babb
In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind, renowned biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb.
Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. There, she befriended the era's literati, including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison; entered into an illegal marriage; and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb's field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. But this is not merely a saga of literary usurping; on her own merits, Babb's impact was profound. Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns's award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl and inspired Kristin Hannah in her bestseller The Four Winds. Riding Like the Wind reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know—and who tells them—can change the way we remember history.
Alex Edmans
Axiom Awards Economics Bronze Medal 2025
Axiom Business 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.
Gerald Epstein
PROSE Awards (Economics) Finalist 2025
Association of American Publishers
Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a Founding Codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Political Economy of Central Banking: Contested Control and the Power of Finance.
Busting the Bankers' Club
Finance for the Rest of Us
Bankers brought the global economic system to its knees in 2007 and nearly did the same in 2020. Both times, the US government bailed out the banks and left them in control. How can we end this cycle of trillion-dollar bailouts and make finance work for the rest of us? Busting the Bankers' Club confronts the powerful people and institutions that benefit from our broken financial system—and the struggle to create an alternative.
Drawing from decades of research on the history, economics, and politics of banking, economist Gerald Epstein shows that any meaningful reform will require breaking up this club of politicians, economists, lawyers, and CEOs who sustain the status quo. Thankfully, there are thousands of activists, experts, and public officials who are working to do just that. Clear-eyed and hopeful, Busting the Bankers' Club centers the individuals and groups fighting for a financial system that will better serve the needs of the marginalized and support important transitions to a greener, fairer economy.
Ieva Jusionyte
LASA-México Best Book in the Social Sciences 2025
Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section
PROSE Awards (Cultural Anthropology & Sociology) 2025
Association of American Publishers
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.
Bayley J. Marquez
AERA Division F New Scholar's Book Award Honorable Mention 2025
American Education Research Association
Bayley J. Marquez is an Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Plantation Pedagogy
The Violence of Schooling across Black and Indigenous Space
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentally educational. Plantation pedagogy and the formal institutions that encompassed it were thus integrally tied to enslavement, settlement, and their inherent violence toward land and people. Marquez investigates how proponents developed industrial education domestically and then spread the model abroad as part of US imperialism. A deeply thoughtful and arresting work, Plantation Pedagogy sits where Black and Native studies meet in order to understand our interconnected histories and theorize our collective futures.
Matthew Morrison
PROSE Awards (Music & Performing Arts) 2025
Association of American Publishers
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.
Hatim Rahman
Axiom Book Award Independent Thought Leaders Silver Medal 2025
Axiom Business Book Awards
Hatim A. Rahman is an award-winning assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Inside the Invisible Cage
How Algorithms Control Workers
Inside the Invisible Cage uses unique longitudinal data to investigate how digital labor platforms use algorithms to dictate the actions of high-skilled workers by determining accepted behaviors, work opportunities, and even success. As Hatim Rahman explains, employers can use algorithms to shift rules and guidelines without notice, explanation, or recourse for workers. The invisible cage signals a profound shift in the way markets and organizations categorize and ultimately control people.
Unlike previous forms of labor control, the invisible cage is ubiquitous, yet it is also opaque and shifting, which makes breaking free from it difficult for workers. This book traces how the invisible cage was developed over time and the implications it has for the spread of new technology, such as generative artificial intelligence. Inside the Invisible Cage also provides organizations, workers, and policymakers with insights on how to ensure the future of work has truly equitable, mutually beneficial outcomes.
Rebecca A. Sharpless
Readers' Choice Book Award Finalist
Reader's Choice Book Awards
Rebecca A. Sharpless is an immigration lawyer and professor at the University of Miami School of Law, where she directs the immigration clinic.
Shackled
92 Refugees Imprisoned on ICE Air
In December 2017, U.S. immigration authorities shackled and abused 92 African refugees for two days while attempting to deport them by plane to Somalia. When national media broke the story, government officials lied about what happened. Shackled tells the story of this harrowing failed deportation, the resulting class action litigation, and two men's search for safety in the United States over the course of three long years.
Through Abdulahi's and Sa'id's firsthand accounts, immigration lawyer Rebecca A. Sharpless brings to life the harsh consequences of the U.S. deportation system and how racism and anti-Blackness operate within it. Sharpless follows the money that ICE funnels into local jails, private contractors, and charter jets, exposing a sprawling system of immigration enforcement that detains and abuses noncitizens at scale. Woven with the wider context of Abdulahi's and Sa'id's stories, this immigration odyssey reveals disturbing truths about Somalia, asylum, and the U.S. court system. Shackled will galvanize readers—attorneys, activists, policymakers, and scholars alike—to call out and dismantle this brutal infrastructure.
Elena Shih
Felicia Krishna Hensel Best Book Award [IDSS]
International Studies Association
Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
Manufacturing Freedom
Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
Sex worker rescue programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. While these rehabilitation programs promise freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers, such organizations actually propagate a moral economy of low‑wage women’s work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality. Manufacturing Freedom is an ethnographic exploration of two American organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. In this innovative study, Elena Shih argues that anti‑trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption.