UC Press Blog

Thomas Aguilera, Francesca Artioli & Claire Colomb 

Alice Amsden Best Book Award Honorable Mention 2026
Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE)

Thomas Aguilera is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Rennes - University of Rennes, France.
Francesca Artioli is Assistant Professor of Spatial Planning and Urban Policies at the Université Paris-Est Créteil, France.
Claire Colomb is Professor of Land Economy (Planning, Public Policy, and Urban Studies) at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Housing Under Platform Capitalism
The Contentious Regulation of Short-Term Rentals in European Cities

Since the birth of Airbnb in 2008, many of the world's cities have been transformed by platform-mediated short-term accommodation—a phenomenon suspected of disturbing local life and removing dwellings from local housing inventories. Drawing on mixed-method, multi-level comparative research in twelve large European cities, coauthors Thomas Aguilera, Francesca Artioli, and Claire Colomb show that strikingly different regulatory regimes have emerged around short-term rentals.

In some cities, policies aim to curb this practice; in others, regulations are simply meant to support the market. These responses are motivated by a variety of political choices and pressures, from grassroots movements to property interests, the tourism industry, and municipal welfare and housing systems. This book makes a crucial contribution to comparative urban politics in the twenty-first century, investigating the capacity of local states to govern housing markets and platform capitalism in an era of globalized human and capital flows. In the face of this worldwide shift, Housing Under Platform Capitalism insists that institutions and regulations can champion the public good by protecting the right to housing and ultimately limiting corporate power.

Sophie Bishop 

MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Award (Monograph category) Shortlist 2026
Media, Communication and Cultural Studies 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.

Cedric De Leon

Leo Panitch Book Prize 2025
Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies

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.

Anny Gaul

James Beard Award (Reference, History, and Scholarship) Nominee 2026
James Beard Foundation

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

Best Culinary History Book in the World, Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2025
“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.

E. Mara Green 

ACLS Open Access Book Prize (Anthropology) Finalist 2026
American Council of Learned Societies

E. Mara Green is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Making Sense
Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal

Making Sense explores the experiential, ethical, and intellectual stakes of living in, and thinking with, worlds wherein language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, many deaf signers use Nepali Sign Language (NSL), a young, conventional signed language. The majority of deaf Nepalis, however, use what NSL signers call natural sign. Natural sign involves conventional and improvisatory signs, many of which recruit semiotic relations immanent in the social and material world. These features make conversation in natural sign both possible and precarious. Sense-making in natural sign depends on signers' skillful use of resources and on addressees' willingness to engage. Natural sign reveals the labor of sense-making that in more conventional language is carried by shared grammar. Ultimately, this highly original book shows that emergent language is an ethical endeavor, challenging readers to consider what it means, and what it takes, to understand and to be understood. 

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.

Andrea Horbinski

Eisner Awards BEST ACADEMIC/SCHOLARLY WORK Nominee 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

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.

Derek Hyra

Best Book in Urban Affairs Award Shortlist 2026
Urban Affairs Association

Derek Hyra is Professor of Public Administration and Policy and founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University. His research focuses on neighborhood change, with an emphasis on housing, urban politics, and race.

Slow and Sudden Violence
Why and When Uprisings Occur

In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra links police violence to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate histories of St. Louis and Baltimore, he shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities.

Repeated decisions to “upgrade” the urban fabric and uproot low-income Black populations have resulted in pockets of poverty inhabited by people experiencing displacement trauma and police surveillance. These interconnected sets of divestments and accumulated frustrations have contributed to eruptions of violence in response to tragic, unjust police killings. To confront American unrest, Hyra urges that we end racialized policing, stop Black community destruction and displacement, and reduce neighborhood inequality.

Rahim Kurwa 

C. Wright Mills Award Finalist 2025
Society for the Study of Social Problems

Rahim Kurwa is Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice, and affiliated faculty in Sociology, at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Making Sense
Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal

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.

Josslyn Jeanine Luckett 

Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (Moving Images) Longlist 2026
Kraszna-Krausz Foundation

Josslyn Jeanine Luckett is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. She is a former staff writer for Queen Sugar and The Steve Harvey Show, and her original teleplay Love Song was directed by Julie Dash for MTV.

Toward a More Perfect Rebellion
Multiracial Media Activism Made in L.A.

Toward a More Perfect Rebellion tells the riveting story of the socially engaged filmmakers of color who studied in the Ethno-Communications Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, between 1969 and 1973. While the program is best known for training the trailblazing group of Black directors known as the L.A. Rebellion, this book also includes the radical Asian American, Chicana/o, and Native American filmmakers who collaborated alongside their Black classmates to create one of the most expansive and groundbreaking bodies of work of any US university cohort. Through extensive interviews with the filmmakers and cross-racial analysis of their collective filmography, Josslyn Jeanine Luckett sheds light on a largely untold history of media activists working outside Hollywood yet firmly rooted in Los Angeles, aiming their cameras with urgency and tenderness to capture their communities' stories of power, struggle, and improvisational brilliance.

Jean Ma

ACLS Open Access Book Award (Literary / Media Studies Category) Finalist 2026
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 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.

Sanyu A. Mojola

C. Wright Mills Award Finalist 2025
Society for the Study of Social Problems

Sanyu A. Mojola is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Maurice P. During Professor of Demographic Studies at Princeton University. She directed Princeton's Office of Population Research from 2020 to 2024.

Death by Design
Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol

Washington, DC, has the nation's largest racial life expectancy gap, and it has experienced many of the nation's worst epidemics, including maternal and infant mortality, homicide, heroin overdoses, and HIV/AIDS. These epidemics have disproportionately affected African Americans. Why and how does racial health inequality exist and persist? Starting from the city's founding in the late 1700s and drawing on a range of sources—including archival material, life history interviews, and census, vital statistics, and disease surveillance data—this book illustrates how the physical, social, and policy design of the city contributes to the production and reproduction of disproportionate Black death.

José Miguel Palacios

BAFTSS Best First Monograph Shortlist 2026
British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies

Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (Moving Images) Longlist 2026
Kraszna-Krausz Foundation

José Miguel Palacios is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Cinematic Arts at California State University, Long Beach.

Transnational Cinema Solidarity
Chilean Exile Film and Video after 1973

After the 1973 coup that put an end to the socialist government of Salvador Allende, most Chilean filmmakers went into exile. Dispersed all over the world, they made more than two hundred fiction films, documentaries, animations, videos, and works for television. José Miguel Palacios builds upon extensive archival research to trace a transnational history of this radical cinema, beginning with its emergence out of global solidarity networks in the 1970s. Chronicling the dangerous efforts to smuggle film reels out of Chile, the discourses of political cinema these films inspired as they traveled between film festivals, and the prints’ unfinished process of return to Chilean archives and museums over the past two decades, Transnational Cinema Solidarity offers a politicized understanding of world and transnational cinema that emphasizes geopolitical relations and cinematic alliances based on solidarity.

Ned Randolph

ACLS Open Access Book Award (Environmental Humanities Category) Finalist 2026
American Council of Learned Societies

Ned Randolph holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. He lives in New Orleans, where he is a Visiting Scholar at Tulane University, and consults and writes about environmental and social issues facing the Gulf South.

Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta
A Call for Reclamation

Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta uses the story of mud to answer a deceptively simple question: How can a place uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise be one of the nation's most promiscuous producers and consumers of fossil fuels? Organized around New Orleans and South Louisiana as a case study, this book examines how the unruly Mississippi River and its muddy delta shaped the people, culture, and governance of the region. It proposes a framework of "muddy thinking" to gum the wheels of extractive capitalism and pollution that have brought us to the precipice of planetary collapse. Muddy Thinking calls upon our dirty, shared histories to address urgent questions of mutual survival and care in a rapidly changing world.

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.

Emily Reisman 

Cultural and Political Ecology Outstanding Publication Award Honorable Mention 2026
Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers

Geography of Food and Agriculture Book Award 2026
AAG  Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group

Emily Reisman is Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

The Almond Paradox
Cracking Open the Politics of What Plants Need

Almonds have become a poster crop for agriculture's environmental controversies. Notorious for consuming vast volumes of water and trucking honeybees across the continent, California's almond orchards appear extraordinarily needy. In Spain, however, almond trees have long epitomized the exact opposite: rain-fed resilience. Often planted at the margins of agricultural viability, almonds are championed for their ecological thrift rather than their thirst. How is it that a crop can be known in such radically different ways? The Almond Paradox explores a captivating contrast between divergent ways of knowing not only how much water or pollination almond trees need, but also which trees should be grown and where. Charting the buildup to a global almond boom, the book exposes how situated histories of capitalism, land, science, and the state profoundly shape the most fundamental ways of understanding agriculture. A recognition of knowledge as place based further reveals how seemingly placeless efficiency deepens ecological precarity.

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.

Joachim J. Savelsberg

ACLS Open Access Book Award Finalist (History Category) 2026
American Council of Learned Societies

Joachim J. Savelsberg is Professor of Sociology and Law and holder of the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur.

Knowing about Genocide
Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles

How do victims and perpetrators generate conflicting knowledge about genocide? Using a sociology of knowledge approach, Savelsberg answers this question for the Armenian genocide committed in the context of the First World War. Focusing on Armenians and Turks, he examines strategies of silencing, denial, and acknowledgment in everyday interaction, public rituals, law, and politics. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic accounts, documents, and eyewitness testimony, Savelsberg illuminates the social processes that drive dueling versions of history. He reveals counterproductive consequences of denial in an age of human rights hegemony, with implications for populist disinformation campaigns against overwhelming evidence.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at https://www.luminosoa.org.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Minnesota. Learn more at the TOME website, available at openmonographs.org.

Allen L. Tran 

ACLS Open Access Book Prize (Anthropology) Finalist 2026
American Council of Learned Societies

Allen L. Tran is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University.

A Life of Worry
Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety

Who, what, and how we fear reflects who we are. In less than half a century, people in Vietnam have gone from fearing bombing raids, political persecution, and starvation to worrying about decisions over the best career path or cell phone plan. This shift in the landscape of people’s anxieties is the result of economic policies that made Vietnam the second-fastest-growing economy in the world and a triumph of late capitalist development. Yet as much as people marvel at the speed of progress, all this change can be difficult to handle.

A Life of Worry unpacks an ethnographic puzzle. What accounts for the simultaneous rise of economic prosperity and anxiety among Ho Chi Minh City’s middle class? The social context of anxiety in Vietnam is layered within the development of advanced capitalism, the history of the medical and psychological sciences, and new ways of drawing the line between self and society. At a time when people around the world are turning to the pharmaceutical and wellness industries to soothe their troubled minds, it is worth considering the social and political dynamics that make the promises of these industries so appealing.

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.

Emily Yates-Doerr

ACLS Open Access Book Prize (Anthropology) Finalist 2026
American Council of Learned Societies

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 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.