UC Press Blog

Timothy O. Benedict

Award for Excellence (Analytical-Descriptive Studies) Finalist 2024
American Academy of Religion

Timothy O. Benedict is Assistant Professor in the School of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan.

Spiritual Ends
Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan

What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with hospice patients, chaplains, and medical workers to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. Benedict uses both local and cross-cultural perspectives to show how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called “healthy” role in society. By paying attention to how care for the kokoro (heart or mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death.

David Bond

Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Anticipatory Anthropology
American Anthropological Association

David Bond teaches anthropology and environment at Bennington College, where he also helps direct the Center for Advancement of Public Action (CAPA). 

Negative Ecologies
Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment

So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hydrocarbon harm that lay the groundwork for environmental science and policy, this book brings into clear focus the dialectic between the negative ecologies of fossil fuels and the ongoing discovery of the environment. Exploring iconic sites of the oil economy, ranging from leaky Caribbean refineries to deepwater oil spills, from the petrochemical fallout of plastics manufacturing to the extractive frontiers of Canada, Negative Ecologies documents the upheavals, injuries, and disasters that have long accompanied fossil fuels and the manner in which our solutions have often been less about confronting the cause than managing the effects. This history of our present promises to re-situate scholarly understandings of fossil fuels and renovate environmental critique today. David Bond challenges us to consider what forms of critical engagement may now be needed to both confront the deleterious properties of fossil fuels and envision ways of living beyond them.

Jonathan Z. Brack

AAR Best First Book in the History of Religions Finalist 2024
American Academy of Religion

Jonathan Z. Brack is Lecturer in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is coeditor of the book Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals.

An Afterlife for the Khan
Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia

Focusing on the famous but understudied figure of the grand vizier Rashid al-Din, a Persian Jew who converted to Islam, Jonathan Z. Brack explores the myriad ways Rashid al-Din and his fellow courtiers investigated, reformulated, and transformed long-standing ideas of authority and power. Out of this intellectual ferment of accommodation, resistance, and experimentation, they developed a completely new understanding of sacred kingship. This new ideal, and the political theology it subtends, would go on to become a central justification in imperial projects across Eurasia in the centuries that followed. An Afterlife for the Khan offers a powerful cultural and intellectual history of this pivotal moment for Islam and empire in the Middle East and Asia.

Divya Cherian

AAR Best First Book in the History of Religions Finalist 2024
American Academy of Religion

Presidents Book Award Honorable Mention 2024
Social Science History Association

Divya Cherian is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

Merchants of Virtue: 
Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia

Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.

Randol Contreras

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, 2024
Choice

Randol Contreras is Associate Professor of Sociology and of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

The Marvelous Ones
Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles
 

Randol Contreras spent close to a decade studying the legendary Maravilla gangs of East LA, who made waves in the 1990s for their rebellion against the most powerful prison gang in the United States: the Mexican Mafia, or La Eme. These men granted Contreras unique access to their experiences, revealing how family members shun them, how jail and prison worsen them, how the church and drug treatment redeem them, and how their brightest moments lie in their pasts as legends of the California gang world. The Marvelous Ones gives human faces to the suffering and resilience of some of the most marginalized members of our society.

Laura Denyer Willis

SLACA Book Prize Honorable Mention 2023
The Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

Laurie Denyer Willis is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

Go with God
Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil

Through deep attention to sense and feeling, Go with God grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, the city's expansive and sprawling peripheral communities. Based on sensory ethnographic fieldwork and attuned to religious desire and manipulation, this book shows how Evangelical belief has changed the way people understand their lives in relation to Brazil's history of violent racial differentiation and inequality. From expressions of otherworldly hope to political exhaustion, Go with God depicts Evangelical life as it is lived and explores where people turn to find grace, possibility, and a future.

Nicole Fabricant

APLA Book Prize Book Prize in Critical Ethnography 2024
Association of Political and Legal Anthropology

Nicole Fabricant is Professor of Anthropology at Towson University in Maryland. She is the author of Mobilizing Bolivia's Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land and is co–executive editor of NACLA Report on the Americas.

Fighting to Breathe:
Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore

Industrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the nation. Because of the concentration of factories and other chemical industries in their neighborhoods, residents face elevated rates of lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses in addition to heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular disease, all of which can lead to premature death. Fighting to Breathe follows a dynamic and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race- and class-based health disparities and inequality in their city. For more than a decade, student organizers stood up to unequal land use practices and the proposed construction of an incinerator and instead initiated new waste management strategies. As a Baltimore resident and activist-scholar, Nicole Fabricant documents how these young organizers came to envision, design, and create a more just and sustainable Baltimore.

Sarah Federman

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, 2024
Choice

Sarah Federman is Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies. Federman is the author of several books including the award-winning Last Train to Auschwitz: The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability. She comes to this work after a decade as an international advertising executive negotiating in over 10 countries with companies such as Google, Discovery, Bloomberg, and the NFL.

Transformative Negotiation
Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures
 

Transformative Negotiation advances an understanding of power and oppression as core to negotiation, arguing that negotiation is central to social mobility and social change. Bringing theory into action, the book explores the real-world examples that Sarah Federman’s own students bring to class, such as negotiating with courts to get their kids back or with the IRS to reduce late fees.
 
Federman explains how heritage, ethnicity, wealth, gender, age, education, and other factors influence what we ask for and how people respond to our requests, as well as what is at stake when we negotiate. This book provides tools to help readers gain confidence in their everyday negotiation skills and link personal success to social transformation.

David M. Freidenreich

Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Historical Studies) Finalist 2024
American Academy of Religion

David M. Freidenreich is Pulver Family Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College and author of Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law.

Jewish Muslims
How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy
 

Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims, David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fraught phenomenon. He makes the compelling case that, then and now, hate-mongers target "them" in an effort to define "us."

Alberto García

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, 2024
Choice

Alberto García is Assistant Professor of History at San José State University.

Abandoning Their Beloved Land:
The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico
 

Abandoning Their Beloved Land offers an essential new history of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers from 1942 to 1964. Using national and local archives in Mexico, historian Alberto García uncovers previously unexamined political factors that shaped the direction of the program, including how officials administered the bracero selection process and what motivated campesinos from central states to migrate. Notably, García's book reveals how and why the Mexican government's delegation of Bracero Program–related responsibilities, the powerful influence of conservative Catholic opposition groups in central Mexico, and the failures of the revolution's agrarian reform all profoundly influenced the program's administration and individuals' decisions to migrate as braceros.

Sahana Ghosh

APLA Book Prize in Critical Anthropology Honorable Mention 2024
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA)

Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore.

A Thousand Tiny Cuts
Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands
 

A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly "friendly" border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.
 

Mariaelena Huambachano

Gourmand Awards B21 Field Work, D16 Indigenous Peoples Shortlist 2024
Gourmand International

Mariaelena Huambachano is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University.

Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways
Indigenous Traditions as a Recipe for Living Well

Based on over ten years of fieldwork in Peru and Aotearoa New Zealand, Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways explores how Quechua and Māori peoples describe, define, and enact well‑being through the lens of foodways. By analyzing how these two Indigenous communities operationalize knowledge to promote sustainable food systems, physical and spiritual well‑being, and community health, Mariaelena Huambachano puts forth a powerful philosophy of food sovereignty called the Chakana/Māhutonga. She argues that this framework offers a foundation for understanding the practices and policies needed to transform the global food system to nourish the world and preserve the Earth. One of the key features of this book is the development of the author’s original research methodology—the Khipu Model—which will serve as a vital resource for future research on Indigenous ways of knowing.

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.

Marina Marchese

Gourmand Awards (E20 Honey) shortlist 2024
Gourmand World Cookbook Awards

C. Marina Marchese is the international best-selling author of The Honey Connoisseur, Honey for Dummies, and Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper. She is a docent for the Italian National Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honey, where she received her formal training. In 2013, she established the American Honey Tasting Society, an educational organization that teaches the Italian methods of honey sensory analysis. Marina's website is honeysommelier.com, and she can be found on social media @honeysommelier.

The World Atlas of Honey
 

A beautifully illustrated global survey of the flavor of honey, The World Atlas of Honey includes profiles of more than eighty countries and the botanical sources of honey found in each. With text, illustrations, and photos, honey expert C. Marina Marchese takes readers through the global history of honey production from the earliest beekeepers to today's harvests.

Towsend Middleton

Gourmand Awards Winner, Food Systems and Acknowledgements
Gourmand World Cookbook Awards

Townsend Middleton is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Quinine's Remains
Empire’s Medicine and the Life Thereafter

What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.

Matthew Morrison

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, 2024
Choice

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.

Rielle Navitski

Modernist Studies Association Book Prize Shortlist
Modernist Studies Association

Rielle Navitski is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia and author of Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil.

Transatlantic Cinephilia
Film Culture between Latin America and France, 1945–1965
 

In the two decades after World War II, a vibrant cultural infrastructure of cineclubs, archives, festivals, and film schools took shape in Latin America through the labor of film enthusiasts who often worked in concert with French and France-based organizations. In promoting the emerging concept and practice of art cinema, these film-related institutions advanced geopolitical and class interests simultaneously in a polarized Cold War climate. Seeking to sharpen viewers' critical faculties as a safeguard against ideological extremes, institutions of film culture lent prestige to Latin America's growing middle classes and capitalized on official and unofficial efforts to boost the circulation of French cinema, enhancing the nation's soft power in the wake of military defeat and occupation. As the first book-length, transnational analysis of postwar Latin American film culture, Transatlantic Cinephilia deepens our understanding of how institutional networks have nurtured alternative and nontheatrical cinemas.

Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, 2024
Choice

Alexandrea J. Ravenelle is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy.

Side Hustle Safety Net
How Vulnerable Workers Survive Precarious Times
 

This is the story of what the most vulnerable wage earners—gig workers, restaurant staff, early-career creatives, and minimum-wage laborers—do when the economy suddenly collapses. In Side Hustle Safety Net, Alexandrea J. Ravenelle builds on interviews with nearly two hundred gig-based and precarious workers, conducted during the height of the pandemic, to uncover the unique challenges they faced in unprecedented times.
 
This book looks at both the officially unemployed and the “forgotten jobless”—a digital-era demographic that turned to side hustles—and reveals how they fared. CARES Act assistance allowed some to change careers, start businesses, perhaps transform their lives. However, gig workers and those involved in “polyemployment” found themselves at the mercy of outdated unemployment systems, vulnerable to scams, and attempting dubious survival strategies. Ultimately, Side Hustle Safety Net argues that the rise of the gig economy, partnered with underemployment and economic instability, has increased worker precarity with disastrous consequences.

Masha Salazkina

2024 Best Book in Cultural Studies Shortlist
American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

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.

World Socialist Cinema
Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War

In this capacious transnational film history, renowned scholar Masha Salazkina proposes a groundbreaking new framework for understanding the cinematic cultures of twentieth-century socialism. Taking as a point of departure the vast body of work screened at the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, World Socialist Cinema maps the circulation of films between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late twentieth century, illustrating the distribution networks, festival circuits, and informal channels that facilitated this international network of artistic and intellectual exchange. Building on decades of meticulous archival work, this long-anticipated film history unsettles familiar stories to provide an alternative to Eurocentric, national, and regional narratives, rooted outside of the capitalist West.

Calvin John Smiley

Frank Tannenbaum Outstanding Book Award 2024
American Society of Criminology Division of Convict Criminology (DCC)

Calvin John Smiley is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College–City University of New York.

Purgatory Citizenship
Reentry, Race, and Abolition

Reentry after release from incarceration is often presented as a story of redemption. Unfortunately, this is not the reality. Those being released must navigate the reentry process with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas, in a journey that is often confusing, complex, and precarious. Making use of life-history interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic fieldwork with low-income urban residents of color, primarily Black men, Calvin John Smiley finds that reentry requires the recently released to negotiate a web of disjointed and often contradictory systems that serve as an extension of the carceral system. No longer behind bars but not fully free, the recently released navigate a state of limbo that deprives them of opportunity and support while leaving them locked in a cycle of perpetual punishment. Warning of the dangers of reformist efforts that only serve to further entrench carceral systems, Purgatory Citizenship advocates for abolitionist solutions rooted in the visions of the people most affected.

James Walvin

 Excellence Certificate of Merit (Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots or World Music) 2024
Association for Recorded Sound Collections

James Walvin is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York. He has published widely on slavery and modern social history. His most recent book is A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power.

Amazing Grace
A Cultural History of the Beloved Hymn

Sung in moments of personal isolation or on state occasions watched by millions, "Amazing Grace" has become an unparalleled anthem for humankind. How did a simple Christian hymn, written in a remote English vicarage in 1772, come to hold such sway over millions in all corners of the modern world? With this short, engaging cultural history, James Walvin offers an explanation.