We are pleased to announce that Matthew S. Hull, author of Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, has won the 2019 J.I Staley Prize, presented by The School for Advanced Research.
The Prize is awarded annually “to a living author for a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship and writing in anthropology. The award recognizes innovative works that go beyond traditional frontiers and dominant schools of thought in anthropology and add new dimensions to our understanding of the human species,” and carries a cash award of $7,500.
The Prize Committee said of Government of Paper, “By tracing the unexpected ways in which documents travel, [Hull] exposes the secret life of paper that profoundly shapes the built landscape of the planned city of Islamabad, and more broadly, gives us new ways of understanding bureaucracy on a global scale.”
Many congratulations to Matthew Hull!
Past UC Press winners of the Prize include:
- Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross by William F. Hanks
- Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us by S. Lochlann Jain
- Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas by Stefan Helmreich
- The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason De León
More can be read about the J.I. Staley Prize here.
