UC Press October Award Winners
UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are our September 2025 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Patricia Aufderheide
Richard Wall Memorial Award 2024
Theatre Library Association
Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor of Communication Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. An award-winning scholar and journalist, she is also author of, among other books, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction.
Kartemquin Films
Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy
The evolution of Kartemquin Films—Peabody, Emmy, and Sundance-awarded and Oscar-nominated makers of such hits as Hoop Dreams and Minding the Gap—is also the story of U.S. independent documentary film over the last seventy years. Patricia Aufderheide reveals the untold story of how Kartemquin developed as an institution that confronts the brutal realities of the industry and society while empowering people to claim their right to democracy.
Kartemquin filmmakers, inspired by pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, made their studio a Chicago-area institution. Activists for a more public media, they boldly confronted in their own productions the realities of gender, race, and class. They negotiated the harsh terms and demands of commercial media, from 16mm through the streaming era, while holding fast to their democratic vision. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and personal experience, Aufderheide tells an inspiring story of how to make media that matters in a cynical world.
Brooke Belisle
Wayland Hand Book Award 2025
American Folklore Society
Brooke Belisle is Associate Professor of Art at Stony Brook University.
Depth Effects
Dimensionality from Camera to Computation
In this bold rewriting of visual culture, Brooke Belisle uses dimensionality to rethink the history and theory of media aesthetics. With Depth Effects, she traces A.I.-enabled techniques of computational imaging back to spatial strategies of early photography, analyzing everyday smartphone apps by way of almost-forgotten media forms. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Belisle explores depth both as a problem of visual representation (how can flat images depict a voluminous world?) and as a philosophical paradox (how do things cohere beyond the limits of our view?). She explains how today's depth effects continue colonialist ambitions toward totalizing ways of seeing. But she also shows how artists stage dimensionality to articulate what remains invisible and irreducible.
Jeremy Braddock
ARSC Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research in Record Labels or General Recording Topics Certificate of Merit 2025
Association for Recorded Sound Collection
Jeremy Braddock teaches literature, media, and sound studies at Cornell University and is author of Collecting as Modernist Practice, which was awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.
Firesign
The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums
This expansive book reclaims the Firesign Theatre (hazily remembered as a comedy act for stoners) as critically engaged artists working in the heart of the culture industry at a time of massive social and technological change. At the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock explores how this inventive group made the lowbrow comedy album a medium for registering the contradictions and collapse of the counterculture, and traces their legacies in hip-hop turntablism, computer hacking, and participatory fan culture.
Ori Burton
25th Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize, Finalist
Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A & M University
MAAH Stone Book Award Shortlist 2024
Museum of African American History
Orisanmi Burton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University.
Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt
Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.
Jennifer S. Clark
Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist 2024
Theatre Library Association
Jennifer S. Clark is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.
Producing Feminism
Television Work in the Age of Women's Liberation
In this deeply archival work, Jennifer S. Clark explores the multiple ways in which women's labor in the American television industry of the 1970s furthered feminist ends. Carefully crafted around an impressive assemblage of interviews and primary sources (from television network memos to programming schedules, production notes to executive meeting agendas), Clark tells the story of how women organized in the workplace to form collectives, affect production labor, and develop reform-oriented policies and philosophies that reshaped television behind the screen. She urges us to consider how interventions, often at localized levels, can collectively shift the dynamics of a workplace and the cultural products created there.
Sahana Ghosh
Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize 2025
Association for Feminist Anthropology
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.
Hemangini Gupta
Sara A. Whaley Prize 2025
National Women's Studies Association
Hemangini Gupta is Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics and Associate Director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh.
Experimental Times
Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India
Experimental Times is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, Hemangini Gupta details the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labor in India's current economy.
Derek Hyra
Goddard Riverside Stephen Russo Book Prize for Social Justice Shortlist 2025
Goddard Riverside
Derek Hyra is Professor of Public Administration and Policy and founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University. His research focuses on neighborhood change, with an emphasis on housing, urban politics, and race.
Slow and Sudden Violence
Why and When Uprisings Occur
In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra links police violence to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate histories of St. Louis and Baltimore, he shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities.
Repeated decisions to “upgrade” the urban fabric and uproot low-income Black populations have resulted in pockets of poverty inhabited by people experiencing displacement trauma and police surveillance. These interconnected sets of divestments and accumulated frustrations have contributed to eruptions of violence in response to tragic, unjust police killings. To confront American unrest, Hyra urges that we end racialized policing, stop Black community destruction and displacement, and reduce neighborhood inequality.
Ieva Jusionyte
Arthur J. Rubel Book Prize Honorable Mention 2024
Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
MacArthur Fellow 2025
MacArthur Foundation
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.
Catherine Hiebert Kerst
Wayland Hand Book Award 2025
American Folklore Society
Catherine Hiebert Kerst is a folklorist, cultural researcher, and writer who worked for many years as Folklife Specialist and Archivist in the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Her work focuses on archival collections from the New Deal era and research on Danish American culture in the Midwest.
California Gold
Sidney Robertson and the WPA California Folk Music Project
California Gold offers a compelling cultural snapshot of a diverse California during the 1930s at the height of the New Deal, drawing on the career of folk music collector Sidney Robertson and the musical culture of often-unheard voices. Robertson—an intrepid young woman armed only with a map, her notebooks, and the recording equipment of the time—proposed and directed a New Deal initiative, the WPA California Folk Music Project, designed to survey musical traditions from a wide range of English-speaking and immigrant communities in Northern California. In California Gold, Catherine Hiebert Kerst explores Robertson's distinctive and modern approach to fieldwork and examines the numerous ethnographic documentary materials she generated with WPA project staff to capture a cross-section of the music that people were actively performing in their communities. Kerst highlights some of the most notable songs, images, and ephemera of the collection, capturing and contextualizing the diverse musical traditions that California immigrant communities performed during the New Deal era. Kerst also foregrounds the ethnographic insights and accomplishments of a significant woman folk music collector who has received less attention than she deserves.
Matthew Morrison
ARSC Awards for Excellence Best History in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, Hip Hop or R&B 2025
Association for Recorded Sound Collection
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.
Emily Yates-Doerr
Diane Forsythe Prize 2025
Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing
Emily Yates-Doerr is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University and author of The Weight of Obesity.
Mal-Nutrition
Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm
Mal-Nutrition documents how maternal health interventions in Guatemala are complicit in reproducing poverty. Policy makers speak about how a critical window of biological growth around the time of pregnancy—called the "first 1,000 days of life"—determines health and wealth across the life course. They argue that fetal development is the key to global development. In this thought-provoking and timely book, Emily Yates-Doerr shows that the control of mothering is a paradigmatic technique of American violence that serves to control the reproduction of privilege and power. She illustrates the efforts of Guatemalan scientists, midwives, and mothers to counter the harms of such mal-nutrition. Their powerful stories offer a window into a form of nutrition science and policy that encourages collective nourishment and fosters reproductive cycles in which women, children, and their entire communities can flourish.