UC Press Blog

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

Rachel Ellis 

Distinguished Book Award 2025
American Sociological Association Sociology of Religion Section

Rachel Ellis is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.

In This Place Called Prison
Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment

In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women’s prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis shows how women draw on religion to navigate lived experiences of carceral control. A trenchant study of religion colliding and colluding with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and constraint, this book speaks to the quest for dignity and light against the backdrop of mass incarceration, state surveillance, and American inequality.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi 

ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award (History) 2025 Finalist 
American Council of Learned Societies

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Archipelago of Resettlement
Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine

What happens when refugees encounter Indigenous sovereignty struggles in the countries of their resettlement? 

From April to November 1975, the US military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on the unincorporated territory of Guam; from 1977 to 1979, the State of Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi analyzes these two cases to theorize what she calls the refugee settler condition: the fraught positionality of refugee subjects whose resettlement in a settler colonial state is predicated on the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. This groundbreaking book explores two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire, examining how the Vietnam War is linked to the US military buildup in Guam and unwavering support of Israel, and second, corresponding archipelagos of trans-Indigenous resistance, tracing how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the Vietnamese refugee figure. Considering distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, Gandhi offers tools for imagining emergent forms of decolonial solidarity between refugee settlers and Indigenous peoples. 

A free open access ebook is available here. 

Hannah Frank 

ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award (Literary Studies) 2025 Finalist
American Council of Learned Societies

Hannah Frank (1984–2017) was Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been published in Critical Quarterly and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and she contributed a chapter to A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood.

Daniel Morgan is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema.

Frame by Frame
A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons

In this beautifully written and deeply researched study, Hannah Frank provides an original way to understand American animated cartoons from the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960). In the pre-digital age of the twentieth century, the making of cartoons was mechanized and standardized: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called “cels”) and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and technicians. In order to see the art, labor, and technology of cel animation, Frank slows cartoons down to look frame by frame, finding hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image. What emerges is both a methodology and a highly original account of an art formed on the assembly line.

A free open access ebook is available here.

Shiguéhiko Hasumi 

Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (Moving Image) Longlist 2025
Kraszna Krausz Foundation

Shiguéhiko Hasumi (1936–) is a film and literary critic and scholar. He received his doctorate from the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and was the twenty-sixth president of the University of Tokyo (1997–2001). He has received numerous awards, including the Yomiuri Bungaku Award for Anti-Nihongoron (Han-Nihongoron, 1977), the Geijutsu Senshō Award for Portrait of a Mediocre Artist: On Maxime Du Camp (Bonʻyō na geijutsuka no shōzō: Makushimu Dyu Kan-ron, 1988), and L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Commandeur from the French Ministry of Culture (1999). His many other works include Lectures on Hollywood Film History (Hariuddo eigashi kōgi, 1993), Godard, Manet, Foucault (Godāru, Manē, Fūkō, 2008), On Madame Bovary (Bovarī fujin-ron, 2014), What Is a Shot? (Shotto to wa nani ka, 2022), and On John Ford (Jon Fōdo-ron, 2022), all untranslated. Hasumi's productive relationships with influential filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Manoel de Oliveira, Theo Angelopoulos, Wim Wenders, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Pedro Costa, Leos Carax, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Shinji Aoyama, and Ryūsuke Hamaguchi are well documented.
 
Aaron Gerow is A. Whitney Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, and of Film and Media Studies, at Yale University. He is the author of Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925. 

Ryan Cook is a film scholar, translator, and librarian. He completed a PhD in Japanese film history at Yale University and has taught at Yale, Harvard, and Emory University.  

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

First published in 1983, Shiguéhiko Hasumi's Directed by Yasujirō Ozu has become one of the most influential books on cinema written in Japanese. This pioneering translation brings Hasumi's landmark work to an English-speaking public for the first time, inviting a new readership to engage with this astutely observed, deeply moving meditation on the oeuvre of one of the giants of world cinema. Complemented by a critical introduction from acclaimed film scholar Aaron Gerow and rendered fluidly in Ryan Cook's agile translation, this volume will grace the shelves of cinephiles for many years to come.
 

Ann E. Lucas 

ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award (History) 2025 Finalist
American Council of Learned Societies

Ann E. Lucas is Assistant Professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Boston College, where she also teaches in the Islamic Civilizations and Societies Program. She is recognized for her work on music historiography of the Middle East. 

Music of a Thousand Years
A New History of Persian Musical Traditions

Iran’s particular system of traditional Persian art music has been long treated as the product of an ever-evolving, ancient Persian culture. In Music of a Thousand Years, Ann E. Lucas argues that this music is a modern phenomenon indelibly tied to changing notions of Iran’s national history. Rather than considering a single Persian music history, Lucas demonstrates cultural dissimilarity and discontinuity over time, bringing to light two different notions of music-making in relation to premodern and modern musical norms. An important corrective to the history of Persian music, Music of a Thousand Years is the first work to align understandings of Middle Eastern music history with current understandings of the region’s political history.

A free open access ebook is available here. 

Jean Ma

ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award (Literary Studies) 2025 Finalist
American Council of Learned Societies

Jean Ma is the author of Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema and Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema. She is the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

At the Edges of Sleep
Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators

Many recent works of contemporary art, performance, and film turn a spotlight on sleep, wresting it from the hidden, private spaces to which it is commonly relegated. At the Edges of Sleep considers sleep in film and moving image art as both a subject matter to explore onscreen and a state to induce in the audience. Far from negating action or meaning, sleep extends into new territories as it designates ways of existing in the world, in relation to people, places, and the past. Defined positively, sleep also expands our understanding of reception beyond the binary of concentration and distraction. These possibilities converge in the work of Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has explored the subject of sleep systematically throughout his career. In examining Apichatpong’s work, Jean Ma brings together an array of interlocutors—from Freud to Proust, George Méliès to Tsai Ming-liang, Weegee to Warhol—to rethink moving images through the lens of sleep. Ma exposes an affinity between cinema, spectatorship, and sleep that dates to the earliest years of filmmaking, and sheds light upon the shifting cultural valences of sleep in the present moment.

A free open access ebook is available here.

Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa 

ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award (Environmental Humanities) 2025 Finalist
American Council of Learned Societies

Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Seattle University.

The Celluloid Specimen
Moving Image Research into Animal Life

In The Celluloid Specimen, Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist films of animal experiments from the 1930s and 1940s. These laboratory recordings—including Robert Yerkes's work with North American primate colonies, Yale University's rat‑based simulations of human society, and B. F. Skinner's promotions for pigeon‑guided missiles—have long been considered passive records of scientific research. In Schultz‑Figueroa's incisive analysis, however, they are revealed to be rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that played a crucial role in American scientific and cultural history—and remain foundational to contemporary conceptions of species, race, identity, and society.

A free open access ebook is available here.

Christy Spackman 

ASU Humanities Institute Book Award 2025
Arizona State University

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.

Samhita Sunya 

ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award (Multimodal) 2025 Finalist
American Council of Learned Societies

Samhita Sunya is Assistant Professor of Cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.

Sirens of Modernity
World Cinema via Bombay

By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand not only for domestic and diasporic audiences but also for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Often confounding critics who painted the song-dance films as noisy and nonsensical. if not dangerously seductive and utterly vulgar, Bombay films attracted fervent worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of Hindi cinema during the long 1960s, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films alongside the efflorescence of European art cinema and Cold War–era forays of Hollywood abroad. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases—flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions—this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.

A free open access ebook is available here.

Emily Yates-Doerr 

Rachel Carson Prize 2025
Society for the Social Study of Science

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.

A free open access ebook is available here.