UC Press Blog

UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are our December 2025 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!

Andrew Campana

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies 2024
Modern Language Association

Andrew Campana is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Media in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University.

Expanding Verse
Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media

Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan's media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms in modern and contemporary Japan—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.

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.

Kirsten Cather

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies Honorable Mention 2025
Modern Language Association

Kirsten Cather is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan.

Scripting Suicide in Japan

Japan is a nation saddled with centuries of accumulated stereotypes and loaded assumptions about suicide. Many pronouncements have been made about those who have died by their own hand, without careful attention to the words of the dead themselves. Drawing upon far-ranging creations by famous twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese writers and little-known amateurs alike—such as death poems, suicide notes, memorials, suicide maps and manuals, works of literature, photography, film, and manga—Kirsten Cather interrogates how suicide is scripted and to what end. Entering the orbit of suicidal writers and readers with care, she shows that through close readings these works can reveal fundamental beliefs about suicide and, just as crucially, about acts of writing. These are not scripts set in stone but graven images and words nonetheless that serve to mourn the dead, straddling two impulses: to put the dead to rest and to keep them alive forever. These words reach out to us to initiate a dialogue with the dead, one that can reveal why it matters to write into and from the void.

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.

Emily Drumsta

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies 2024
Modern Language Association

Emily Drumsta is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is editor and translator of Revolt Against the Sun: Selected Poetry of Nazik al-Malaʼika

Ways of Seeking
The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation

In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novel’s place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves.

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.

Kent Dunlap

Non-Obvious Book Awards Longlist 2025
Non-Obvious Book Awards

Kent Dunlap is Professor of Biology at Trinity College, Hartford, where he teaches physiology and anatomy and conducts research on the neurobiology and behavior of fishes (animals without necks!). In the summers, he also makes pottery and sculpts ceramic animals.

The Neck
A Natural and Cultural History

Humans give a lot of attention to the neck. We decorate it with jewelry and ties, kiss it passionately, and use it to express ourselves in word and song. Yet, at the neck, people have also shackled their prisoners, executed their opponents, and slain their victims. Beyond the drama of human culture, animals have evolved their necks into a staggering variety of shapes and uses vital to their lifestyles. The Neck delves into evolutionary time to solve a living paradox—why is our neck so central to our survival and culture, but so vulnerable to injury and disease?
 
Biologist Kent Dunlap shows how the neck's vulnerability is not simply an unfortunate quirk of evolution. Its weaknesses are intimately connected to the vessels, pipes, and glands that make it so vital to existence. Fun and far-reaching, The Neck explores the diversity of forms and functions of the neck in humans and other animals and shows how this small anatomical transition zone has been a locus of incredible evolutionary and cultural creativity. 

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

The Procedure Awards Longlist 2026
Procedure Press/Uncommon Bold

Karen Bloom Gevirtz spent nearly three decades as a professor of English at American universities while also specializing in gender studies and medical humanities.

The Apothecary's Wife
The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity

 

Contrary to the familiar story, medication did not improve during the Scientific Revolution. Yet somehow, between 1650 and 1740, the domestic female and the physician switched places in the cultural consciousness: she became the ineffective, potentially dangerous quack, he the knowledgeable, trustworthy expert. The professionals normalized the idea of paying them for what people already got at home without charge, laying the foundation for Big Pharma and today’s global for-profit medication system. A revelatory history of medicine, The Apothecary’s Wife challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth. Drawing on a vast body of archival material, Karen Bloom Gevirtz depicts the extraordinary cast of characters who brought about this transformation. She also explores domestic medicine’s values in responses to modern health crises, such as the eradication of smallpox, and what benefits we can learn from these events.
 

Jeremiah Lockwood

Jewish Music Special Interest Group Prize 2025
Society for Ethnomusicology

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. He is currently a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Both his music performance and scholarship gravitate toward the Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early twentieth century, and the reverberations of this cultural moment in present day communities. Lockwood’s research considers the work of cantors as arbiters of social, intellectual, and aesthetic change in times of crisis and cultural transformation. Jeremiah received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2021. Jeremiah was a 2022–23 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Fellow, where he conducted research on the khaznte phenomenon of gramophone-era women performers of cantorial music and composed a new piece of music responding to this fecund moment in Jewish musical history. Jeremiah has recorded more than a dozen albums over a music career that spans decades with his band The Sway Machinery and other projects. 

Golden Ages
Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era
 

Golden Ages is an ethnographic study of young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community who base their aesthetic explorations of the culturally intimate space of prayer on the gramophone-era cantorial golden age. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers aspiring Hasidic singers a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority are aligned.

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.

Darshana Sreedhar Mini

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies Honorable Mention 2024
Modern Language Association

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and coeditor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene.

Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India

In the 1990s, India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre’s circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form negotiate their social lives. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and

China Scherz, George Mpanga and  Sarah Namirembe 

Bethwell A. Ogot Prize 2025
African Studies Association

China Scherz is Professor of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and author of Having People, Having Heart. George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe are independent researchers living in Kampala, Uganda.

Higher Powers
Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City

Higher Powers draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave behind problematic alcohol use. Given the relatively recent introduction of biomedical ideas of alcoholism and addiction in Uganda, most of these people have used other therapeutic resources, including herbal aversion therapies, engagements with balubaale spirits, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches. While these methods are at times severe, they contain within them understandings of the self and practices of sociality that point away from models of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease and towards the possibility of release. Higher Powers offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.

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.

C. Luke Soucy

Raffaella Cribiore Award for Outstanding Literary Translation 2025
Society for Classical Studies

C. Luke Soucy is a translator, poet, and vocal Minnesota native. In addition to literary translation, he has worked in regional theatre, in a chromatography lab, and as a university bureaucrat. Soucy is a 2019 graduate of Princeton University, where he received the E. E. Cummings Society Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses
A New Translation

Centuries of conservative translators have robbed the Metamorphoses of its subversive force. In this boldly lyrical translation, C. Luke Soucy revives the magnum opus of Rome’s most clever and creative poet, faithfully matching the epic’s wit and style while confronting the sexuality, violence, and politics so many previous translations have glossed over.
 
Soucy’s powerful version breathes new life into Ovid's mythic world, where canonical power dynamics are challenged from below to drain heroes of their heroism, give victims their say, and reveal an earth holier than heaven. Incorporating the latest scholarship alongside annotations, illustrations, and glossary, this edition brings fresh insights to both returning and new readers.

Christy Spackman 

ASFS Best First Book Award 2025
Association for the Study of Food and Society

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor of Art/Science at Arizona State University and Director of the Sensory Labor(atory), an experimental research collective dedicated to creatively disrupting longstanding sensory hierarchies.

The Taste of Water
Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage

Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment processes. By focusing on the relationship between taste and the environment, Christy Spackman shows how efforts to erase unwanted tastes and smells have transformed water into a highly industrialized food product divorced from its origins. The Taste of Water invites readers to question their own assumptions about what water does and should naturally taste like while exposing them to the invisible—but substantial—sensory labor involved in creating tap water.

Emily Yates-Doerr

Eileen Basker Memorial Prize 2025
Society for Medical Anthropology

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.