UC Press September Award Winners
Lucia Carminati
Best Book in Urban History (excluding the U.S., Canada, and Europe) 2024
Urban History Association
Lucia Carminati is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.
Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said:
Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859–1906
Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants' prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal's making.
Rachel Ellis
Michael J. Hindelang Outstanding Book Award 2024
American Society of Criminology
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.
Charlotte Karem Albrecht
Arab American Book Award Honorable Mention
Arab American National Museum
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Assistant Professor of American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Possible Histories:
Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling
Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.
Phaedra C. Pezzullo
Diamond Anniversary Book Award 2024
National Communication Association
James A. Winans - Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address
National Communication Association
Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award in Environmental Communication
National Communication Award
Phaedra C. Pezzullo is Associate Professor of Communication, Media Studies, Environmental Studies, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of multiple books, including Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. She is a founding codirector of the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change.
Beyond Straw Men:
Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care
Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond “hot take” or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Phaedra C. Pezzullo engages public controversies and policies through analysis of hashtag activism, campaign materials, and podcast interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam. She argues that plastics have become an articulator of crisis and an entry point into the contested environmental politics of carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men illustrates how everyday people resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care.
Masha Salazkina
USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies 2024
Association for Slavic Studies, East European, and Eurasian Studies
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.