UC Press January Award Winners
Lucia Carminati
Berkshire Conference First Book 2023
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
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.
Divya Cherian
Berkshire Conference Berkshire Conference First Book 2023, Honorable Mention
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
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.
Jatin Dua
Monsoon Book Prize in Political Economy 2025, Honorable Mention
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.
Asaf Elia-Shalev
74th National Jewish Book Awards Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award (History) 2025, Finalist
Jewish Book Council
Asaf Elia-Shalev is an Israeli American journalist based in Los Angeles. He is a staff writer for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which distributes his work to dozens of media outlets in multiple languages.
Israel's Black Panthers
The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth
Israel's Black Panthers tells the story of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country's political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a yearslong political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country's establishment and change the course of Israel's history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass.
Alix Johnson
SCMS Best First Book Prize 2025
Society for Cinema & Media Studies
Alix Johnson is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Macalester College.
Where Cloud Is Ground
Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland
Where Cloud Is Ground offers an ethnography of the international data storage industry and an inquiry into the relationship between data and place. Based in Iceland, which is fast becoming a hot spot for data centers—facilities where large quantities of data are processed and stored—the book traces the fraught work of siting data’s material manifestations in relation to landforms and earth processes, local politics, national narratives, and still-open questions of spatial justice and sovereignty. Doing so, it unsettles techno-utopian ideals of connectivity and offers a window into what it means to live with our data, in a place where more and more data now lives.
Ieva Jusionyte
Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America 2025
Duke Human Rights Center
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
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.
Nathaniel Mathews
Monsoon Book Prize in Anthropology and Archaeology 2025
German University of Technology in Oman/GSU
Nathaniel Mathews is a historian of East Africa and the Indian Ocean. He received his PhD from Northwestern University and is currently Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at SUNY Binghamton.
Zanzibar Was a Country
Exile and Citizenship between East Africa and the Gulf
Zanzibar Was a Country traces the history of a Swahili-speaking Arab diaspora from East Africa to Oman. In Oman today, whole communities in Muscat speak Swahili, have recent East African roots, and practice forms of sociality associated with the urban culture of the Swahili coast. These "Omani Zanzibaris" offer the most significant contemporary example in the Gulf, as well as in the wider Indian Ocean region, of an Afro-Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in a diasporic setting. While they come from all over East Africa, a large number are postrevolution exiles and emigrés from Zanzibar. Their stories provide a framework for the broader transregional entanglements of decolonization in Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Using both vernacular historiography and life histories of men and women from the community, Nathaniel Mathews argues that the traumatic memories of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 are important to nation-building on both sides of the Indian Ocean.
Ryo Morimoto
Modern Japan History Association Book Prize 2025
Modern Japan History Association
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.
Tim Palmer
Francis Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction 2025, Finalist
Oregon Book Award
Tim Palmer is an author and photographer of environmental issues, river conservation, nature, and adventure travel. His thirty-two books have won numerous awards. For the past five decades he has been professionally and personally involved in flooding and issues of floodplain management. See his work at www.timpalmer.org.
Seek Higher Ground
The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis
With Seek Higher Ground, environmental writer and former land-use planner Tim Palmer explores the legacy of flooding in America, taking a fresh look at the emerging climatic, economic, and ecological realities of our rivers and communities. Global warming is forecast to sharply intensify flooding, and this book urges that we reduce future damage in the most effective, efficient, and equitable ways possible.
Jim Sykes and Julia Suzanne Byl
Monsoon Book Prize in Archaeology and Anthropology 2025
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.