UC Press September Award Winners
Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Geo Maher & Damien M. Sojoyner
Association for Ethnic Studies Outstanding Book 2026
Association for Ethnic Studies
Yousuf Al-Bulushi is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City.
Geo Maher is founding Coordinator of the W. E. B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction in Philadelphia, and author of Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance.
Damien M. Sojoyner is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums.
Reading Black Reconstruction Today
We are living through a period of perpetual crises and explosive struggles for liberation on a global scale. This transdisciplinary collection explores what W. E. B. Du Bois's groundbreaking 1935 work, Black Reconstruction in America, tells us about repression and resistance across the world, asking: What do abolition and reconstruction mean today? What would it take for these concepts to become a global reality? How can we make sense of our political moment, from the resurgence of Black consciousness across the Americas, to the rise of neofascism in Europe and beyond, to the fight against land dispossession in Africa? Reading "Black Reconstruction" Today draws together a group of leading scholars and activists to explore the lasting relevance of Du Bois's political masterwork.
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.
Utku Baris Balaban
APSA-MENA Best Senior Book Award 2025-2026
American Political Science Association – Middle East and North Africa
Utku Balaban is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Race, Intersectionality, Gender, and Sociology at Xavier University. He is author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh and Social Inclusion Policies in Turkey.
Industrial Islamism
How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers
Industrial Islamism analyzes the relationship, since the end of the Cold War, between the rise of political Islamism in Muslim-majority countries and the rise of a new global "middle class" of industrial entrepreneurs. Challenging common assumptions, Utku Balaban questions the idea that political Islamism represents the antithesis of Western modernity and industrialization. On the contrary: the more enthusiastically a Muslim-majority country industrializes, the more "Islamized" its politics becomes.
The book focuses on Turkey, historically the most industrialized Muslim-majority country in the world, with the most successful Islamist movement and a relatively competitive electoral system. It provides a fine-grained historical and ethnographic analysis at the local level of urban-industrial control over workers in sweatshops and working-class neighborhoods by this new global middle class, whom Balaban calls the faubourgeoisie. As the central actor behind Turkey's post–Cold War industrialization, the faubourgeoisie allies with the Islamist movement to control its workers and significantly influence national politics.
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.
Youssef Belal
E. Ohnuki-Tierney Book Award for Historical Anthropology 2026
American Anthropological Association
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.
Christopher J. Bonura
Albert C. Outler Prize Finalist 2026
Middle East Studies Association
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.
Tracie Canada
Association of Black Anthropologists First Book Award Honorable Mention 2026
Association of Black Anthropologists
Margaret Mead Award 2026
Society for Applied Anthropology
Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her work has been featured in public venues and outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Guardian, and Scientific American.
Tackling the Everyday
Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football
A Black feminist take on exploitation and care in America's favorite game.
Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives.
Tackling the Everyday shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game.
Niall Docherty
Nancy Baym Book Award Honorable Mention 2026
Association of Internet Researchers
Niall Docherty is a Lecturer in Data, AI, and Society in the Information School at the University of Sheffield.
Healthy Users
The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media
We are often told that social media well-being is simply the result of individual users making healthy digital choices. All it takes is a little self-discipline. In this book, Niall Docherty looks closely at this belief and exposes the complex relations of power expressed through its articulation and enactment. Docherty creatively and empirically shows how the discourses, designs, and habits of online well-being push user conduct in certain directions, at the expense of others. This is a contingent mode of governance that combines logics of neoliberalism, practices of psychologized person-making, and persuasive capitalist interfaces. By highlighting the damaging effects of this current arrangement, Healthy Users charts a path that will change how we understand and study social media well-being in the future.
Qian Liu
Asian Law and Society Association Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention 2026
Asian Law and Society Association
Qian Liu is Assistant Professor of Law and Society in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary.
Leftover Women in China
Understanding Legal Consciousness through Intergenerational Relationships
Leftover Women in China offers an intimate empirical and theoretical analysis of the lived experience and legal consciousness of China's "leftover women," women who remain unmarried in their late twenties and beyond. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups, Qian Liu examines how leftover women—including women who prefer to remain single, those who are waiting for the right husband, and queer women—deal with parental and social pressures, as well as the denial of their right to have children outside of heterosexual marriage. Sensitively exploring the distinctive patterns of parent-child interactions in Chinese families, Liu invites readers to understand leftover women's observance, evasion, and manipulation of the law in the context of intergenerational relationships and obligations.
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.
Shawn William Miller
Royal Automobile Club Motoring Book of the Year Awards (Motor Cars and Motoring) Shortlist 2026
Royal Automotive Club
Shawn William Miller is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and author of An Environmental History of Latin America and The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro.
Dream Road to Pan America
A Century in Pursuit of the World's Longest Highway
An expansive and subversive history of the Pan-American Highway.
A century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its story remains largely unknown—even to the hundreds of motorists who annually attempt the 30,000-kilometer drive from far northern Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. There is more to the highway, however, than the persistent allure of the open road. In Dream Road to Pan America, historian Shawn William Miller unveils a larger tale of lofty ideals and bedrock greed, romantic adventure and pragmatic diplomacy, immigrant desperation and Indigenous resistance.
This book journeys to the early 1920s when everyday Americans invented the idea of a road that would spread fraternity, democracy, and prosperity across the hemisphere. It looks at the commercial and geopolitical interests that shaped the highway—often with little concern for those living along its margins—and explains why the road became an escape route for millions of migrants rather than a corridor for tourists. Miller contends that the highway’s troubled past points to an unresolved future, offering insights into the growing costs of continuing down well-worn paths.
Darshana Sreedhar Mini
Bonnier Ritter Book Award 2026
Feminist & Gender Studies Division, National Communication Association
Darshana Sreedhar Mini is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and coeditor of South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene.
Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India
In the 1990s, India’s mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre’s circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry’s utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel who are marked by their involvement with a taboo form negotiate their social lives. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.
Margaret Elizabeth Peacock
Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society Book Prize 2026
Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society
Margaret Peacock is Professor of History at the University of Alabama. She is author of Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War and coauthor of A Deeper Sickness: Journal of America in the Pandemic Year.
Frequencies of Deceit
How Global Propaganda Wars Shaped the Middle East
On June 8, 1967, Egypt's most famous radio broadcaster, Ahmed Said, reported that Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces had defeated the Israeli army in the Sinai, had hobbled their British and US allies, and were liberating Palestine. It was a lie.
For the rest of his life, populations in the Middle East vilified Said for his duplicity. However, the truth was that, by 1967, all the world's major broadcasters to the Middle East were dissimulating on the air. For two decades, British, Soviet, American, and Egyptian radio voices created an audio world characterized by deceit and betrayal. In this important and timely book, Margaret Peacock traces the history of deception and propaganda in Middle Eastern international radio. Peacock makes the compelling argument that this betrayal contributed to the loss of faith in Western and secular state-led political solutions for many in the Arab world, laying the groundwork for the rise of political Islam.
Mark Robert Rank
NYC Big Book Award (Sociology) 2026
New York City Big Book Award
Mark Robert Rank is Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at Washington University in St. Louis. He has received numerous awards for his scholarship and books, and his research has been reported in a wide range of national and international media.
The Random Factor
How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us
It’s comforting to think that we can be successful because we work hard, climb ladders, and get what we deserve, but each of us has been profoundly touched by randomness. Chance is shown to play a crucial role in shaping outcomes across history, throughout the natural world, and in our everyday lives. In The Random Factor, Mark Robert Rank draws from a wealth of evidence, including interviews and research, to explain how luck and chance play out and reveals how we can use these lessons to guide our personal lives and public policies.
The Random Factor traverses luck from macro to micro, from events like the Cuban Missile Crisis to our personal encounters and relationships. From his perspective as a scholar of poverty, Rank also delves into the class and race dynamics of chance, emphasizing the stark disparities it brings to light. This transformative book prompts a new understanding of the twists and turns in our daily lives and encourages readers to fully appreciate the surprising world of randomness in which we live.
Etsuko Taketani
Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies Honorable Mention 2026
American Studies Association
Etsuko Taketani is Professor of American Literature at the University of Tsukuba, Japan.
Aerial Archives of Race
African American Cultural Expressions and the Black Nuclear Pacific
Opening new perspectives in transpacific studies, Etsuko Taketani examines the genealogy and contours of the aerial imaginary and the corollary shifting planetary imaginary that evolved in a transnational space she names the “Black nuclear Pacific.” Following the first dropping of an atom bomb on humans and the subsequent military occupation of Japan by the United States, Black-Japanese encounters happened on a scale unimaginable before World War II. Analyzing texts by a diverse range of artists, writers, and political thinkers who had formative interactions with occupied Japan—including the NAACP’s Walter White, lawyer Edith Sampson, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X—Taketani uncovers African American cultural expressions that include a quasi–alien abduction narrative, the literary creation of a new tribe in the image of a rainbow, a Black futuristic apocalypse, and a racial fantasy of the Mother Plane. Aerial Archives of Race tracks the Black networks and exchanges with Japan that provoked new ways of thinking about (human) races on planet Earth.
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) 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.