UC Press June Award Winners
UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are our June 2025 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Zeke Baker
Barrington Moore Book Award 2025
ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section
Zeke Baker is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and coeditor of Climate, Science and Society.
Governing Climate
How Science and Politics Have Shaped Our Environmental Future
After decades of debate about global warming, the fact of the climate crisis is finally widely accepted. People at all scales—from the household to the global market—are attempting to govern climate to deal with its causes and impacts. Although the stakes are different now, governing climate is centuries old. In this book, Zeke Baker develops a genealogy of climate science that traces the relationship between those who have created knowledge of the climate and those who have attempted to gain power and govern society, right up to the present, historic moment. Baker draws together over two centuries of science, politics, and environmental change to demonstrate the "co-production" of climate knowledge and power-seeking activity, with a focus on the United States. This book provides a fresh account of contemporary issues transecting science and climate politics, specifically the rise of "climate security," and examines how climate science can either facilitate or reconcile the unequal distribution of power and resources.
Christina Gerhardt
ASLE Ecocriticism Book Award Finalist 2025
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Barron Professor of Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. Her environmental journalism has been published by Grist.org, The Nation, The Progressive, and the Washington Monthly.
Sea Change
An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean
One of the Best Science Books of 2023, New Scientist
This immersive portal to islands around the world highlights the impacts of sea level rise and shimmers with hopeful solutions to combat it.
Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does an island see when the sea rises? Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean weaves together essays, maps, art, and poetry to show us—and make us see—island nations in a warming world.
Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but they are suffering the brunt of it. This transportive atlas reorients our vantage point to place islands at the center of the story, highlighting Indigenous and Black voices and the work of communities taking action for local and global climate justice. At once serious and playful, well-researched and lavishly designed, Sea Change is a stunning exploration of the climate and our world's coastlines. Full of immersive storytelling, scientific expertise, and rallying cries from island populations that shout with hope—"We are not drowning! We are fighting!"—this atlas will galvanize readers in the fight against climate change and the choices we all face.
Mariaelena Huambachano
Gourmand Awards Best Food & Indigenous People Book in the World 2024
Gourmand International
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Best First Book Award Honorable Mention 2025
Native American and Indigenous Studies
Mariaelena Huambachano is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities – Native and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University.
Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways
Indigenous Traditions as a Recipe for Living Well
Based on over ten years of fieldwork in Peru and Aotearoa New Zealand, Recovering Our Ancestral Foodways explores how Quechua and Māori peoples describe, define, and enact well‑being through the lens of foodways. By analyzing how these two Indigenous communities operationalize knowledge to promote sustainable food systems, physical and spiritual well‑being, and community health, Mariaelena Huambachano puts forth a powerful philosophy of food sovereignty called the Chakana/Māhutonga. She argues that this framework offers a foundation for understanding the practices and policies needed to transform the global food system to nourish the world and preserve the Earth. One of the key features of this book is the development of the author’s original research methodology—the Khipu Model—which will serve as a vital resource for future research on Indigenous ways of knowing.
Charles Keith
Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize Honorable Mention 2025
French Colonial Historical Society
Charles Keith is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University.
Subjects and Sojourners
A History of Indochinese in France
During the era of French colonial rule in Indochina, as many as two hundred thousand Indochinese sojourned in France. Subjects and Sojourners is a vivid and comprehensive social, cultural, and political history of this diverse group, which ranged from ruling monarchs to the most marginal laborers. Drawing from a range of rich but underused archives, Charles Keith explores how French colonialism extended Indochina’s colonial society into France, where Indochinese subjects studied, labored, fought, and lived in imperial spaces and contexts that were profoundly different from those they had left behind. Time in France transformed these sojourners, and when they returned to Indochina, they in turn transformed colonial society. Indochinese, in short, did not simply encounter “France” in the colony: they went and lived it for themselves.
Neil Lee
Regional Studies Association Best Book Award 2025
Regional Studies Association
Neil Lee is Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Innovation for the Masses
How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy
An engaging, solutions-oriented look at how cities and nations can better foster innovation and equality.
From San Francisco to Shanghai, many of the world's most innovative places are highly unequal, with the benefits going to a small few. Rather than simply asking how we can create more high-tech cities and nations, Innovation for the Masses focuses on what we can learn from places that foster innovation while also delivering the benefits more widely and equally. In this book, economist Neil Lee draws on case studies of Taiwan, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland to set out how innovation can be successfully balanced toward equity.
As high-tech economies around the world suffer from polarized labor markets and political realities that lock in these problems, this book looks beyond the United States to other models of distributing a leading-edge economy. Lee emphasizes the active role of the state in creating frameworks to ensure that benefits are broadly shared, revealing that strong policies for innovation and mutual prosperity reinforce each other. Ultimately, Innovation for the Masses provides a vital window into alternative models that prioritize equity, the roadblocks these models present, and what other countries can learn from them going forward.
Chelsea Schields
Elsa Goveia Book Prize Honorable Mention 2025
Association of Caribbean Historians
Chelsea Schields is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.
Offshore Attachments
Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean
Offshore Attachments reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world’s largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens. Historian Chelsea Schields demonstrates how Caribbean people both embraced and challenged efforts to alter intimate behavior in service to the energy economy. Moving from Caribbean oil towns to European metropolises and examining such issues as sex work, contraception, kinship, and the constitution of desire, Schields narrates a surprising story of how racialized concern with sex shaped hydrocarbon industries as the age of oil met the end of empire.