UC Press July Award Winners
Christopher J. Bonura
Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize Shortlist 2026
Ecclesiastical History Society
Christopher J. Bonura is Assistant Professor of History at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland.
A Prophecy of Empire
The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius from Late Antique Mesopotamia to the Global Medieval Imagination
The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was one of the medieval world’s most popular and widely translated texts. Composed in Syriac in Mesopotamia in the seventh century, this supposed revelation presented a new, salvific role for the Roman Empire, whose last emperor, it prophesied, would help bring about the end of the ages. In this first book-length study of Pseudo-Methodius, Christopher J. Bonura uncovers the under-appreciated Syriac origins of this apocalyptic tract, revealing it as a remarkable response to political realities faced by Christians living under a new Islamic regime. Tracing the spread of Pseudo-Methodius from the early medieval Mediterranean to its dissemination via the printing presses of early modern Europe, Bonura then demonstrates how different cultures used this new vision of empire’s role in the end times to reconfigure their own realities. The book also features a new, complete, and annotated English translation of the Syriac text of Pseudo-Methodius.
Cedric De Leon
47th Annual American Book Award
Before Columbus Foundation
Cedric de Leon is Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Freedom Train
Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity
Most accounts of interracial solidarity focus on white union activists. In Freedom Train, Cedric de Leon, a former organizer and elected leader in the US labor movement, argues that we can't comprehend the history of workers' triumphs in the United States without investigating the role of Black liberation. This book shows that, from the early twentieth century to the years immediately following the March on Washington and beyond, independent Black labor organizations have pushed the white labor movement toward a fierce and effective interracial solidarity.
Drawing on the minutes, correspondence, and speeches of Black labor activists and organizations from 1917 to 1968, de Leon reveals that Black people have been the most ardent and consistent proponents of racial inclusion, leadership representation, and programs linking economic and racial justice. He also demonstrates how conflict and consensus among Black labor groups fueled the fight for solidarity, as different factions split and consolidated to form successive and sometimes competing Black labor organizations. Freedom Train centers the contributions of Black people to the multiracial unions we have today and demonstrates that internal conflict can be a source of strategic innovation and social movement success.
Hanna Garth
Setha M. Low Engaged Anthropology Award 2026
American Anthropological Association
Hanna Garth is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, author of Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal, and coeditor of Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice.
Food Justice Undone
Lessons for Building a Better Movement
“A piercing ethnographic study of the power dynamics and misunderstandings that plague 'food justice' nonprofits."—Publishers Weekly
Breaks open the privilege and promise of food justice to envision a radical liberatory future.
Food justice activists have worked to increase access to healthy food in low-income communities of color across the United States. Yet despite their best intentions, they often perpetuate food access inequalities and racial stereotypes. Hanna Garth shows how the movement has been affected by misconceptions and assumptions about residents, as well as by unclear definitions of justice and what it means to be healthy. Focusing on broad structures and microlevel processes, Garth reveals how power dynamics shape social justice movements in particular ways.
Drawing on twelve years of ethnographic research, Garth examines what motivates people from more affluent, majority-white areas of the city to intervene in South Central Los Angeles. She argues that the concepts of "food justice" and "healthy food" operate as racially coded language, reinforcing the idea that health problems in low-income Black and Brown communities can be solved through individual behavior rather than structural change. Food Justice Undone explores the stakes of social justice and the possibility of multiracial coalitions working toward a better future.
Anny Gaul
Best Culinary History Book in the World, Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2025
Gourmand World Cookbook Awards
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
“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.
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag
BAVS Rosemary Mitchell Prize Honorable Mention 2026
British Association for Victorian Studies
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University in Canberra and author of Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection.
The Chosen Race
Troubling Whiteness in Victorian Painting
From the Realist canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites to the Aesthetic experiments of James McNeill Whistler, The Chosen Race confronts the complex negotiations of whiteness that played out across British art of the nineteenth century. Examining the representation of racial supremacy, difference, and indeterminacy in paintings produced in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag explores the many ways Victorian painters engaged with racial ideas at the height of British imperial dominance. While at times these painters reinforced racial hierarchies, at other times they problematized them, revealing race to be a fundamentally unstable organizing principle by which to build an empire and classify its subjects.
Andrea Horbinski
Eisner Awards Best Academic/Scholarly Work 2026
San Diego Comic Con
Andrea Horbinski earned her PhD in modern Japanese history and new media from the University of California, Berkeley. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies and as the submissions editor for Mechademia: Second Arc.
Manga's First Century
How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905–1989
A comprehensive English-language history of a beloved medium, Manga’s First Century tells the story of the artists and fans who built a cultural juggernaut.
Manga is the world’s most popular style of comics. How did manga and anime—“moving manga”—become ubiquitous? Manga’s First Century delves into the history and finds surprising answers.
In fact, manga has always been a global phenomenon. Countering essentialist myths of manga’s emergence from the deepest wells of Japanese art, author Andrea Horbinski shows it was born in the early 1900s, a hybrid form that crossed single-panel satirical cartoons popular in Europe and America with the Edo period’s artistic legacy. As a medium, manga initially focused on political commentary, expanding to include social satire, children’s comics, and proletarian art in the 1920s and 1930s. Manga’s evolution into a medium embracing complex, long-form storytelling was likewise driven by creators and fans pushing publishers to accept new, radical expansions in manga’s artistic and narrative practices. In the 1970s, innovative creators and fans empowered a new breed of fan-generated comics (dojinshi) and established robust audiences of adult, female, and queer manga readers, while nurturing generations of amateur and professional creators who continue to enrich and renew manga today.
Rahim Kurwa
Community and Urban Studies Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention 2026
American Sociological Association
Edwin H. Sutherland Book Award Honorable Mention 2026
SSSP Law & Society Division
Rahim Kurwa is Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice, and affiliated faculty in Sociology, at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Indefensible Spaces
Policing and the Struggle for Housing
Indefensible Spaces examines the policing of housing through the story of Black community building in the Antelope Valley, Los Angeles County's northernmost outpost. Tracing its evolution from a segregated postwar suburb to a destination for those priced, policed, and evicted out of Los Angeles, Rahim Kurwa tells the story of how the Antelope Valley resisted Black migration through the policing of subsidized housing—and how Black tenants and organizers fought back. This book sheds light on how the nation's policing and housing crises intersect, offering powerful lessons for achieving housing justice across the country.
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.
Bettina Ng'weno
Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award Longlist 2026
Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Bettina Ng’weno is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis and author of Turf Wars: Territory and Citizenship in the Contemporary State. She was born in Nairobi.
No Place Like Home in a New City
Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi
Nairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New City traverses rivers, cemeteries, parks, railways, housing estates, roads, and dancehalls to explore how policies of anti-urbanism manifest across time and space, shaping how people live in Nairobi. With deeply personal insights, Bettina Ng’weno highlights how people contest anti-urbanism through their insistence on building life in the city, even in the current dynamic of ubiquitous demolition and reconstruction. Through quotidian practices and creative resistance, they imagine alternatives to displacement, create belonging, and build new urban futures.
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.
Fernando Ortiz-Moya
Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award Longlist 2026
Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Fernando Ortiz-Moya is Chief Policy Researcher with the Integrated Sustainability Centre at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan.
We're Still Here
Regenerating Shrinking Cities from the Ground Up
In a world that expects cities to fuel economic growth and attract millions of people every year, there's something unnerving about the phrase "shrinking cities." But thousands of cities are getting smaller, leaving vacant homes, abandoned factories, and oversized infrastructure. Shrinking cities pose a new problem for urban planners: how to manage the transition to fewer residents with a tool kit designed for expansion.
Urbanist Fernando Ortiz-Moya argues that instead of chasing regrowth, cities can embrace their smaller size and build on their unique character and history to enhance life for those who remain. We're Still Here contrasts official responses to shrinkage with spontaneous bottom-up actions led by traditionally marginalized residents in the cities of Pittsburgh, Manc hester, and Kitakyushu. These stories show how decline becomes a springboard for social and physical (re)construction and justice-driven urbanism—revealing both the limits of pro-growth planning and the seeds of a new approach that he calls "(Re)City-Making." Far from a cautionary tale, this book makes a convincing case for the shrinking city as a laboratory for innovative, people-centered urban policy and collective empowerment.