UC Press Blog

Diana W. Anselmo

Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist 2023
Theatre Library Association

Diana W. Anselmo is a feminist film historian and a queer immigrant. Her work has been featured in a number of journals, including Screen, Camera Obscura, Film History, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Journal of Women's History. Her research has received support from the Fulbright/Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, and the International Association for Media and History, among others.

A Queer Way of Feeling
Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood

A Queer Way of Feeling gathers an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs to explore how girls coming of age in the United States in the 1910s used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos into personal scrapbooks and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, girl fans from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of feeling "queer" or "different from the norm." These material testimonies show how a forgotten audience engendered terminologies, communities, and creative practices that became cornerstones of media fan reception and queer belonging.

Mira Balberg

Jordan Schnitzer Book Award (Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity)
Association of Jewish Studies

Mira Balberg is Professor of History and Endowed Chair in Ancient Jewish Civilization at the University of California, San Diego. She is author of Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature and Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature and coauthor of When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature.

Fractured Tablets: 
Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture

This book examines the significant role that memory failures play in early rabbinic literature. The rabbis who shaped Judaism in late antiquity envisioned the commitment to the Torah and its commandments as governing every aspect of a person’s life. Their vision of a Jewish subject who must keep constant mental track of multiple obligations and teachings led them to be preoccupied with forgetting: forgetting tasks, forgetting facts, forgetting texts, and—most broadly—forgetting the Torah altogether. In Fractured Tablets, Mira Balberg examines the ways in which the early rabbis approached and delineated the possibility of forgetfulness in practice and study and the solutions and responses they conjured for forgetfulness, along with the ways in which they used human fallibility to bolster their vision of Jewish observance and their own roles as religious experts. In the process, Balberg shows that the rabbis’ intense preoccupation with the prospect of forgetfulness was a meaningful ideological choice, with profound implications for our understanding of Judaism in late antiquity.

Divya Cherian

John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History 2024
American Historical 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.

William Darity, A. Kirsten Mullen, and Lucas Hubbard

American Book Fest Awards (Social Change category) 2024
American Book Fest

William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and founding director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. With A. Kirsten Mullen, he is author of the award-winning From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. Most recently, he is one of the editors of The Pandemic Divide: How COVID Increased Inequality in America.

A. Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. Her most recent book is From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.

Lucas Hubbard is an associate in research at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. His writing has appeared in INDY Week, Duke Magazine, Paste, and Deadspin; he is also one of the editors of The Pandemic Divide: How COVID Increased Inequality in America.

The Black Reparations Project: 
A Handbook for Racial Justice

A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars—members of the Reparations Planning Committee—who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward.

Rachel Ellis

SSSR Distinguished Book Award 2024
Society for the Scientific Study of Religion

Rachel Ellis is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.

In This Place Called Prison: 
Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment

In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women’s prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis shows how women draw on religion to navigate lived experiences of carceral control. A trenchant study of religion colliding and colluding with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and constraint, this book speaks to the quest for dignity and light against the backdrop of mass incarceration, state surveillance, and American inequality.

Nicole Fabricant

AAA Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in Anthropology
American Anthropological Association

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.

Duana Fullwiley

Diana Forsythe Award 2024
Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing

Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.

Tabula Raza:
Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science
 

Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve.

Alberto García

William M. LeoGrande Prize 2023
Center for Latin and Latino Studies, American University

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.

Gregg Gardner

Jordan Schnitzer Book Award (Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity) Finalist
Association for Jewish Studies

Gregg E. Gardner is Associate Professor and Diamond Chair of Jewish Law and Ethics at the University of British Columbia. He is author of The Origins of Organized Charity in Rabbinic Judaism.

Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity
 

Charity is central to the Jewish tradition. In this formative study, Gregg E. Gardner takes on this concept to examine the beginnings of Jewish thought on care for the poor. Focusing on writings of the earliest rabbis from the third century c.e., Gardner shows how the ancient rabbis saw the problem of poverty primarily as questions related to wealth—how it is gained and lost, how it distinguishes rich from poor, and how to convince people to part with their wealth. Contributing to our understanding of the history of religions, Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity demonstrates that a focus on wealth can provide us with a fuller understanding of charity in Jewish thought and the larger world from which Judaism and Christianity emerged.
 

Anna Gjika

Division on Feminist Criminology Best Book Award 2024
American Society of Criminology  Division of Feminist Criminology

Robert Jerin Book of the Year Award 2024
American Society of Criminology Division on Victimology

Anna Gjika is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

When Rape Goes Viral: 
Youth and Sexual Assault in the Digital Age

Stories of teen sexting scandals, cyberbullying, and image-based sexual abuse have become commonplace fixtures of the digital age, with many adults struggling to identify ways to monitor young people’s digital engagement. In When Rape Goes Viral, Anna Gjika argues that rather than focusing on surveillance, we should examine such incidents for what they tell us about youth peer cultures and the gender norms and sexual ethics governing their interactions. Drawing from interviews with teens and high-profile cases of mediated juvenile sexual assault, Gjika exposes the deeply unequal and heteronormative power dynamics informing teens’ intimate relationships and online practices, and she critically interrogates the role of digital cultures and broader social values in sanctioning abuse. The book also explores the consequences of social media and digital evidence for young victim-survivors and perpetrators of sexual assault, detailing the paradoxical capacities of technology for social and legal responses to gender-based violence.

Roger Lancaster

Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize 2024
AAA Human Sexuality & Anthropology Interest Group

Roger N. Lancaster is Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at George Mason University. He is author of Life is Hard and Sex Panic and the Punitive State, among other books.

The Struggle to Be Gay—in Mexico, for Example

Known for his writings on the construction of sexual identities, anthropologist and cultural studies scholar Roger N. Lancaster ponders four decades of visits to Mexican cities. In a brisk series of reflections combining storytelling, ethnography, critique, and razor-edged polemic, he shows, first, how economic inequality affects sexual subjects and subjectivities in ways both obvious and subtle, and, second, how what it means to be de ambiente—“on the scene” or “in the life”—has metamorphosed under changing political-economic conditions. The result is a groundbreaking intervention into ongoing debates over identity politics—and a renewal of our understanding of how identities are constructed, struggled for, and lived.

Julia Kelto Lillis

AHA Prize in History prior to CE 1000 2024
American Historical Association

Julia Kelto Lillis is Assistant Professor of Early Church History at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.

Virgin Territory:
Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity
 

Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitions of virginity and understood its bodily aspects in surprising, often nonanatomical ways. Eventually Christians took part in a cross-cultural shift toward viewing virginity as something that could be perceived in women's sex organs. Treating virginity as anatomical brought both benefits and costs. By charting this change and situating it in the larger landscape of ancient thought, Virgin Territory illuminates unrecognized differences among early Christian sources and historicizes problematic ideas about women's bodies that still persist today.

Sureshkumar Muthukumaran

Jerry Bentley Prize in World History 2024
American Historical Association

Sureshkumar Muthukumaran is a historian of the ancient world. He is a Lecturer in History at the National University of Singapore and has previously taught at University College London and Yale-NUS College.

The Tropical Turn:
Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean
 

This book chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, showing the significant impact South Asia had on the ecologies, dietary habits, and cultural identities of peoples across the ancient world. In the process, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers a fresh narrative history of human connectivity across Afro-Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the late centuries BCE.

Kerry O'Brien and William Robin

ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism 2024
ASCAP Foundation Deem Thomson-Virgil Taylor Awards Program

Kerry O'Brien is a writer and musicologist who teaches at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She has published work on minimalism and experimentalism in Rethinking Reich, Tempo, the Chicago Reader, and the New York Times.

William Robin is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland School of Music, author of Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, and a contributor to the New York Times.

On Minimalism:
Documenting a Musical Movement

 

On Minimalism moves from the style's beginnings in psychedelic counterculture through its present-day influences on ambient jazz, doom metal, and electronic music. The editors look beyond the major figures to highlight crucial and diverse voices—especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ musicians—that have shaped the genre. Featuring more than a hundred rare historical sources, On Minimalism curates this history anew, documenting one of the most important musical movements of our time.

Cesraéa Rumpf

EDWIN H. SUTHERLAND BOOK AWARD Honorable Mention 2024
Society for the Study of  Social Problems

Cesraéa Rumpf is Associate Director of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Recovering Identity:
Criminalized Women's Fight for Dignity and Freedom


 

Recovering Identity examines a critical tension in criminalized women's identity work. Through in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews, Cesraéa Rumpf shows how formerly incarcerated women engaged recovery and faith-based discourses to craft rehabilitated identities, defined in opposition to past identities as "criminal-addicts." While these discourses made it possible for women to carve out spaces of personal protection, growth, and joy, they also promoted individualistic understandings of criminalization and the violence and dehumanization that followed. Honoring criminalized women's stories of personal transformation, Rumpf nevertheless strongly critiques institutions' promotion of narratives that impose lifelong moral judgment while detracting attention from the structural forces of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to women's vulnerability to violence.

Chelsea Schields

AHA Prize in European International History 2024
American Historical Association

Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in women’s history and/or feminist theory 2024
American Historical Association

Chelsea Schields is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

Offshore Attachments: 
Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean

Offshore Attachments reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world’s largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens. Historian Chelsea Schields demonstrates how Caribbean people both embraced and challenged efforts to alter intimate behavior in service to the energy economy. Moving from Caribbean oil towns to European metropolises and examining such issues as sex work, contraception, kinship, and the constitution of desire, Schields narrates a surprising story of how racialized concern with sex shaped hydrocarbon industries as the age of oil met the end of empire.

Nomi Stone

Association for Middle East Anthropology Book Award 2024
Association for Middle East Anthropology

Nomi Stone is an award-winning anthropologist and poet. An Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas, she was most recently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton. She is author of two ethnographic collections of poetry, Stranger's Notebook and Kill Class, and her poems appear in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, and widely elsewhere.

Pinelandia:
An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire

Across the pine forests and deserts of America, there are mock Middle Eastern villages, mostly hidden from public view. Containing mosques, restaurants, street signs, graffiti in Arabic, and Iraqi role-players, these villages serve as military training sites for cultural literacy and special operations, both seen as crucial to victory in the Global War on Terror. In her gripping and highly original ethnography, anthropologist Nomi Stone explores US military predeployment training exercises and the lifeworlds of the Iraqi role-players employed within the mock villages, as they act out to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary or ally. Spanning fieldwork across the United States and Jordan, Pinelandia traces the devastating consequences of a military project that seeks to turn human beings into wartime technologies recruited to translate, mediate, and collaborate. Theorizing and enacting a field poetics, this work enlarges the ethnographic project into new cross-disciplinary worlds. Pinelandia is a political phenomenology of American empire and Iraq in the twenty-first century.