UC Press July Award Winners
UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are our July 2025 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Amy C. Beal
ARSC Best Historical Research in Recorded Classical Music Finalist 2025
Association for Recorded Sound Collection
Amy C. Beal is Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, Carla Bley, and Johanna Beyer.
Terrible Freedom
The Life and Work of Lucia Dlugoszewski
From her childhood in Detroit to her professional career in New York City, American composer Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925–2000) lived a life of relentless creativity as a poet and writer, composer for dance, theater, and film, and, eventually, choreographer. Forging her own path after briefly studying with John Cage and Edgard Varèse, Dlugoszewski tackled the musical issues of her time. She expanded sonic resources, invented instruments, brought new focus to timbre and texture, collaborated with artists across disciplines, and incorporated spiritual, psychological, and philosophical influences into her work. Remembered today almost solely as the musical director for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Dlugoszewski's compositional output, writings on aesthetics, creative relationships, and graphic poetry deserve careful examination on their own terms within the history of American experimental music.
Jeremy Braddock
ARSC Best Research on Record Labels or General Recording Topics Finalist 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.
Chiara Galli
International Migration Section Best Book Award Honorable Mention 2025
American Sociological Association Section on International Migration
Latina/o Sociology Section Best Book Award 2025
American Sociological Association Latina/o Sociology Section
Chiara Galli is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.
Precarious Protections Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the United States
More children than ever are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum worldwide. In the past decade, over a half million children have fled from Central America to the United States, seeking safety and a chance to continue lives halted by violence. Yet upon their arrival, they fail to find the protection that our laws promise, based on the broadly shared belief that children should be safeguarded. A meticulously researched ethnography, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. Chiara Galli debunks assumptions about asylum, including the idea that people are being denied protection because they file bogus claims. In practice, the United States interprets asylum law far more narrowly than what is necessary to recognize real-world experiences of escape from life-threatening violence. This is especially true for children from Central America. Galli reveals the formidable challenges of lawyering with children and exposes the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy.
Catherine Hiebert Kerst
ARSC Best Research in Recorded Country, Folk, World, or Roots Music Finalist 2025
Association for Recorded Sound Collection
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 Best Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop, Funk, or Soul Music Finalist 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.
Sureshkumar Muthukumaran
Regional Studies Association Best Book Award 2025
Regional Studies Association
Sureshkumar Muthukumaran is a historian of the ancient world. He is a Lecturer in History at the National University of Singapore and has previously taught at University College London and Yale-NUS College.
The Tropical Turn
Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean
This book chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, showing the significant impact South Asia had on the ecologies, dietary habits, and cultural identities of peoples across the ancient world. In the process, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers a fresh narrative history of human connectivity across Afro-Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the late centuries BCE.
Hatim Rahman
EGOS Book Award Shortlist 2025
European Group for International Studies
George R. Terry Book Award
Academy of Management
McGannon Book Award 2025
McGannon Center Communication Research at Fordham University
Hatim A. Rahman is an award-winning assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Inside the Invisible Cage
How Algorithms Control Workers
Inside the Invisible Cage uses unique longitudinal data to investigate how digital labor platforms use algorithms to dictate the actions of high-skilled workers by determining accepted behaviors, work opportunities, and even success. As Hatim Rahman explains, employers can use algorithms to shift rules and guidelines without notice, explanation, or recourse for workers. The invisible cage signals a profound shift in the way markets and organizations categorize and ultimately control people.
Unlike previous forms of labor control, the invisible cage is ubiquitous, yet it is also opaque and shifting, which makes breaking free from it difficult for workers. This book traces how the invisible cage was developed over time and the implications it has for the spread of new technology, such as generative artificial intelligence. Inside the Invisible Cage also provides organizations, workers, and policymakers with insights on how to ensure the future of work has truly equitable, mutually beneficial outcomes.