UC Press Recent Award-Winning Authors

Brandon Andrew Robinson

2022 Distinguished Scholarship Award, Honorable Mention
Pacific Sociological Association

Brandon Andrew Robinson is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and co-author of Race and Sexuality.

Coming Out to the Streets: LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the U.S. youth homelessness population. In Coming Out to the Streets, Brandon Andrew Robinson examines their lives.

Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets looks into the LGBTQ youth’s lives before they experience homelessness—within their families, schools, and other institutions—and later when they navigate the streets, deal with police, and access shelters and other services. Through this documentation, Brandon Andrew Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape the ways that the LGBTQ youth negotiate their gender and sexuality before and while they are experiencing homelessness. To address LGBTQ youth homelessness, Robinson contends that solutions must move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. In highlighting the voices of the LGBTQ youth, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change.

Christy Thornton

2022 Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award
Latin American Studies Association

Christy Thornton is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy

Revolution in Development uncovers the surprising influence of postrevolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century’s most important international economic institutions. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Christy Thornton meticulously traces how Mexican officials repeatedly rallied Third World leaders to campaign for representation in global organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions. By decentering the United States and Europe in the history of global economic governance, Revolution in Development shows how Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians fought for more than five decades to reform the rules and institutions of the global capitalist economy. In so doing, the book demonstrates, Mexican officials shaped not only their own domestic economic prospects but also the contours of the project of international development itself.

Corinna Zeltsman

2022 Howard F. Cline Prize
Latin American Studies Association

Corinna Zeltsman is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Georgia Southern University. She is trained as a letterpress printer.

Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

During the independence era in Mexico, individuals and factions of all stripes embraced the printing press as a key weapon in the broad struggle for political power. Taking readers into the printing shops, government offices, courtrooms, and streets of Mexico City, historian Corinna Zeltsman reconstructs the practical negotiations and discursive contests that surrounded print over a century of political transformation, from the late colonial era to the Mexican Revolution. Centering the diverse communities that worked behind the scenes at urban presses and examining their social practices and aspirations, Zeltsman explores how printer interactions with state and religious authorities shaped broader debates about press freedom and authorship. Beautifully crafted and ambitious in scope, Ink under the Fingernails sheds new light on Mexico’s histories of state formation and political culture, identifying printing shops as unexplored spaces of democratic practice, where the boundaries between manual and intellectual labor blurred.