UC Press April Award Winners
Sophie Bishop
Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2026
British Sociological Association
Sophie Bishop is Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and former Specialist Advisor to the UK Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. She is a contributor to the Financial Times, the BBC, The Atlantic, and other outlets.
Influencer Creep
How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture
A sculptor works while wearing a GoPro camera to capture Instagram content. A painter decides whether to make pieces that she won't be able to share on Instagram, after her account was blocked for sharing "sexualized" content. An artist finds that her portraits of light-skinned women get an algorithmic boost over those featuring dark-skinned models. These creative workers are now using the content-generation skills and promotional strategies pioneered by influencers to compete for visibility online.
Influencer Creep explores what happens when creative workers must go beyond their work to build a comprehensive online presence. Creator studies expert Sophie Bishop delineates how the tactics of professional influencers affect the ways creative workers navigate social media platforms. They must optimize their content to win the favor of opaque algorithms they do not control. They must engage in relentless self-branding, creating a compelling, consistent, and platform-ready image. And that image, in spite of being carefully manufactured, must be perceived as authentic.
Taking seriously the motivations that drive more and more people into the contest for online visibility, Influencer Creep documents a creative workforce nervously conforming to the monopoly power of social media platforms—and occasionally resisting it.
Anny Gaul
Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship Shortlist 2025
Kitchen Arts & Letters
Anny Gaul is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and coeditor of Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean. She also runs the popular food blog Cooking with Gaul.
Nile Nightshade
An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato
Best Culinary History Book in the World, Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2025
“Leaves few cultural-societal stones unturned in chronicling how the tomato gradually came to be a constant presence in Egyptian life.”—The Wall Street Journal
A cultural and culinary history of modern Egypt through the nation's beloved tomato.
By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity—and sometimes reinforced them.
In Nile Nightshade, Anny Gaul shows how Egyptians' embrace of the tomato and the emergence of Egypt's modern national identity were both driven by the modernization of the country's food system. Drawing from cookbooks, archival materials, oral histories, and vernacular culture, Gaul follows this commonplace food into the realms of domestic policy and labor through the hands of Egypt's overwhelmingly female home cooks. As they wrote recipes and cooked meals, these women forged key aspects of public culture that defined how Egyptians recognized themselves and one another as Egyptian.
Qian Liu
W. Wesley Pue Prize Shortlist 2026
Canadian Law and Society Association
Qian Liu is Assistant Professor of Law and Society in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary.
Leftover Women in China
Understanding Legal Consciousness through Intergenerational Relationships
Leftover Women in China offers an intimate empirical and theoretical analysis of the lived experience and legal consciousness of China's "leftover women," women who remain unmarried in their late twenties and beyond. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups, Qian Liu examines how leftover women—including women who prefer to remain single, those who are waiting for the right husband, and queer women—deal with parental and social pressures, as well as the denial of their right to have children outside of heterosexual marriage. Sensitively exploring the distinctive patterns of parent-child interactions in Chinese families, Liu invites readers to understand leftover women's observance, evasion, and manipulation of the law in the context of intergenerational relationships and obligations.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.