UC Press March Award Winners
Youssef Belal
Hart-SLSA Book Prize 2026
Socio-Legal Studies Association (UK)
Youssef Belal is an anthropologist and political theorist. He is also a UN diplomat and peace mediator who served as political director of UN missions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, and was named a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in 2016. He is author of Le cheikh et le calife: Sociologie religieuse de l’Islam politique au Maroc (The sheikh and the caliph: Religious sociology of political Islam in Morocco).
The Life of Shari'a
A Comparative Anthropology of Law
Is there a way to think about contemporary life with knowledge that is neither modern nor Western? Rather than confining Islam to a “religion” and shariʿa to its “law,” Youssef Belal provocatively argues that Islamic shariʿa is a mode of knowledge with its own concepts and scholarly categories through which the world and the self are grasped. The Life of Shariʿa considers two intertwined lineages: how Islamic scholars have formulated knowledge from the classical period to today and how Westerners have understood the law and its origins. By melding these two traditions, Belal puts the formation of modern law under a new light and offers, through a compelling conceptualization of shariʿa, a powerful argument for its continued relevance to the life of contemporary Muslims.
Fahad Ahmad Bishara
John R. Lyman Book Award Shortlist 2026
North American Society for Oceanic History
Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950.
Monsoon Voyagers
An Indian Ocean History
Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow, the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants used the technologies of colonial capitalism—banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more—to remake their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself. Drawing on the Crooked's first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, Monsoon Voyagers narrates the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf's past, it suggests, played out across the sea as much as it did the land.
Sophie Bishop
Philip Abrams Memorial Prize Shortlist 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.
Kirsten Cather
John Whitney Hall Book Prize 2026
Association of Asian Studies
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.
Yolanda Ariadne Collins
John Ruggie Best Book Award 2025
International Studies Association
Yolanda Ariadne Collins is Lecturer in the School of International Relations at University of St Andrews. She studies the intersection between climate change governance, environmental policy, and international development. Her work examines processes of racialization and histories of colonialism and the ways in which they challenge the successful enactment of forest governance policies in the Global South.
Forests of Refuge
Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield
Forests of Refuge questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. Yolanda Ariadne Collins interrogates the most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities: the United Nations–endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores REDD+ in Guyana and neighboring Suriname, two highly forested countries in the Amazonian Guiana Shield with low deforestation rates. Yet REDD+ implementation there has been fraught with challenges. Adopting a multisited ethnographic approach, Forests of Refuge takes readers into the halls of policymaking, into conservation development organizations, and into forest-dependent communities most affected by environmental policies and exploitative colonial histories. This book situates these challenges in the inattentiveness of global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It advocates that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization.
Andrew deWaard
Media Industries Scholarly Interest Group Best Book Award
SCMS Media Industries Scholarly Interest Group (MISIG)
Andrew deWaard is Associate Professor of Media and Popular Culture at the University of California, San Diego, and coauthor of The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape.
Derivative Media
How Wall Street Devours Culture
Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming the very character of our mediascapes for branded transactions. Our media are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music—and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture.
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.
Eric Hoyt and Kelley Conway
SCMS Best Edited Collection 2026
Society for Cinema & Media Studies
Eric Hoyt is Kahl Family Professor of Media Production in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press and Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video. He also serves as Director of the Media History Digital Library and Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Kelley Conway is Professor of Film in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Agnès Varda and Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film.
Global Movie Magazine Networks
This groundbreaking collection of essays from leading film historians features original research on movie magazines published in China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Latin America, South Korea, the U.S., and beyond. Vital resources for the study of film history and culture, movie magazines are frequently cited as sources, but rarely centered as objects of study. Global Movie Magazine Networks does precisely that, revealing the hybridity, heterogeneity, and connectivity of movie magazines and the important role they play in the intercontinental exchange of information and ideas about cinema. Uniquely, the contributors in this book have developed their critical analysis alongside the collaborative work of building digital resources, facilitating the digitization of more than a dozen of these historic magazines on an open-access basis.
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.
Matt Mahmoudi
BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize Shortlist 2026
British Sociological Association
Matt Mahmoudi is Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, where he works on racialized borders in digital cities. He has led Amnesty International's research on biometrics from New York City to Palestine and coedited Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence.
Migrants in the Digital Periphery
New Urban Frontiers of Control
As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corporations. In cities of refuge, where communities on the move once lived in anonymity and proximity to familial and diaspora networks, the possibility for escape is diminishing.
As cities rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, identification, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they also invite the border to encroach further on migrant communities, networks, and bodies. In this book, Matt Mahmoudi unveils how the unsettling convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism has allowed tech companies to close in on the final frontiers of fugitivity—and suggests how we might counteract their machines through our own refusal.
David McNally
International Labor History Association Book of the Year Award 2025
International Labor History Association
David McNally is Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston, where he directs the Project on Race and Capitalism. He is the author of seven previous books and more than sixty scholarly articles.
Slavery and Capitalism
A New Marxist History
Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor have fallen out of favor among historians, but David McNally injects new life into them. Slavery and Capitalism gives the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery—using colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, and slave narratives—to support the provocative claim for enslaved labor in the plantation system as capitalist commodity production.
Weaving together history, political economy, and radical abolitionism, McNally demonstrates that plantation slaves formed a modern working class. Unlike those scholars who insist that enslaved people were too sensible to set their sights on liberty, he highlights the self-activity of enslaved people fighting for their freedom and reframes their resistance as labor struggles over production and reproduction, with significant implications for US and Atlantic history and for understanding the roots of racial capitalism.
Matthew D. Morrison
Irving Lowens Book Award
Society for American Music
Woody Guthrie Award 2026
IASPM-US
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
"No book from this past year better explains American popular music than professor Matthew Morrison’s Blacksound."—A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of 2024
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.
Tavia Nyong'o
Science Fiction Research Association Book Award (Best Scholarly Monograph in Science Fiction) 2025
Science Fiction Research Association
Tavia Nyong’o is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. He is a professor of performance studies at Yale University and a curator at the Park Avenue Armory.
Black Apocalypse
Afrofuturism at the End of the World
Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong’o shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.
Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong'o examines the social, technological, and existential threats facing our species and reflects on shifting anxieties and hopes for the future. Exploring the apocalypse in movies, art, literature, and music, this book considers the endless afterlives of slavery and inequality and revives the radical black imagination to envision the future of blackness. Black Apocalypse argues that black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next.
Dana Simmons
2025 Emory Elliott Award 2025
UC Riverside Center for Ideas & Society
Dana Simmons is an historian of science and technology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France.
On Hunger
Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic
In this book, Dana Simmons explores the enduring production of hunger in US history. Hunger, in the modern United States, became a technology—a weapon, a scientific method, and a policy instrument. During the nineteenth century, state agents and private citizens colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing using hunger and food deprivation. In the twentieth century, officials enacted policies and rules that made incarcerated people, welfare recipients, and beneficiaries of foreign food aid hungry by design, in order to modify their behavior. With the advent of ultraprocessed foods, food manufacturers designed products to stimulate cravings and consumption at the expense of public health. Taking us inside the labs of researchers devoted to understanding hunger as a biological and social phenomenon, On Hunger examines the continuing struggle to produce, suppress, or control hunger in America.
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.
Amy Skjerseth
H. Earle Johnson Sight & Sound Subvention Award 2026
Society for American Music
Amy Skjerseth is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the University of California, Riverside and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Voice and Identity.
Preprogrammed
How Electronic Presets Changed Music and Media
How much of your life is preprogrammed? Presets, or default settings on technology, can be found everywhere from predictive text and Instagram filters to microwave popcorn buttons and morning alarms. But while presets facilitate the completion of tasks and the production of art, they also reinforce—and sometimes challenge—economic, political, and social norms. In Preprogrammed, interdisciplinary scholar Amy Skjerseth turns to modern music and media to explore what presets allow and deny. Employing capitalist, queer, and feminist critique to reveal how audiovisual presets have reconfigured ways of seeing and hearing over the past century, Skjerseth shows how, from the popularization of the push-button car radio in the 1930s to the Auto-Tune era and the advent of AI, artists have co-opted preset technologies to develop new forms of artistic and cultural expression. An urgent reconsideration of the cultural and political systems we often take for granted, this book is an elegantly theorized and paradigm-shifting invitation to rethink the profundity of the everyday.
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.