UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are several of our August 2023 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Darra Goldstein
2023 Award, Literary or Historical Food writing, Finalist
International Association of Culinary Professionals
Darra Goldstein is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita, at Williams College and founding editor of Gastronomica. She is author of six award-winning cookbooks, including Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore.
The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food
The Kingdom of Rye unearths the foods and flavors of the Russian land. Preeminent food studies scholar Darra Goldstein offers readers a concise, engaging, and gorgeously crafted story of Russian cuisine and culture. This story demonstrates how national identity is revealed through food—and how people know who they are by what they eat together. The Kingdom of Rye examines the Russians’ ingenuity in overcoming hunger, a difficult climate, and a history of political hardship while deciphering Russia’s social structures from within. This is a domestic history of Russian food that serves up a deeper history, demonstrating that the wooden spoon is mightier than the scepter.
Lynne Haney
2023 Sex & Gender Distinguished Book Award, Winner
American Sociological Association Sex and Gender Section
Lynne Haney is Professor of Sociology at New York University and author of the award-winning books Offending Women and Inventing the Needy. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program.
Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers
In the first study of its kind, sociologist Lynne Haney travels into state institutions across the country to document the experiences of the millions of fathers cycling through the criminal justice and child support systems. Prisons of Debt shows how these systems work together to create complex entanglements—rather than “piling up” in men’s lives, these entanglements form feedback loops of disadvantage. The prison–child support pipeline flows in both directions, deepening parents’ debt and criminal justice involvement.
Jarrod Hore
2023 NSW Premiers History Awards (General History Category), Shortlist
State Library of NSW
Jarrod Hore is an environmental historian and Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Program at University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism
Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.
Corrina Laughlin
Nancy Bayam Annual Book Award, Winner
Association of Internet Researchers
Corrina Laughlin teaches media studies at Loyola Marymount University and holds a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture
Redeem All examines the surprising intersection of American evangelicalism and tech innovation. Corrina Laughlin looks at the evangelical Christians who are invested in imagining, using, hacking, adapting, and creating new media technologies for religious purposes. She finds that entrepreneurs, pastors, missionaries, and social media celebrities interpret the promises born in Silicon Valley through the framework of evangelical culture and believe that digital media can help them (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) put their own dent in the universe. Laughlin introduces readers to “startup churches” hoping to reach a global population, entrepreneurs coding for a deeper purpose, digital missionaries networking with mobile phones, and Christian influencers and podcasters seeking new forms of community engagement. Redeem All reveals how evangelicalism has changed as it eagerly adopts the norms of the digital age.
Marion Nestle
2023 Award, Literary or Historical Food Writing, Finalist
International Association of Culinary Professionals
Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University and author of a wide range of books about the politics of food, nutrition, health, and the environment.
Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics
In this engrossing memoir, Marion Nestle reflects on how she achieved late-in-life success as a leading advocate for healthier and more sustainable diets. Slow Cooked recounts of how she built an unparalleled career at a time when few women worked in the sciences, and how she came to recognize and reveal the enormous influence of the food industry on our dietary choices.
Bryce Clayton Newell
2022 Surveillance Studies Network Book Award, Winner
Surveillance Studies Network
Bryce Clayton Newell is Assistant Professor of Media Law and Policy in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He is the editor of Police on Camera, Privacy in Public Space, and Surveillance, Privacy, and Public Space.
Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras
Police Visibility presents empirically grounded research into how police officers experience and manage the information politics of surveillance and visibility generated by the introduction of body cameras into their daily routines and the increasingly common experience of being recorded by civilian bystanders. Newell elucidates how these activities intersect with privacy, free speech, and access to information law and argues that rather than being emancipatory systems of police oversight, body-worn cameras are an evolution in police image work and state surveillance expansion. Throughout the book, he catalogs how surveillance generates information, the control of which creates and facilitates power and potentially fuels state domination. The antidote, he argues, is robust information law and policy that puts the power to monitor and regulate the police squarely in the hands of citizens.
Jennifer Sherman
2023 Frederick H. Buttel Award, Winner
Outstanding Scholarly Achievement for a Book Rural Sociological Society
Jennifer Sherman is Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington State University. She is the author of Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America and a coeditor of Rural Poverty in the United States.
Dividing Paradise: Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream
Late-stage capitalism is trying to remake rural America in its own image, and the resistance is telling. Small-town economies that have traditionally been based on logging, mining, farming, and ranching now increasingly rely on tourism, second-home ownership, and retirement migration. In Dividing Paradise, Jennifer Sherman tells the story of Paradise Valley, Washington, a rural community where amenity-driven economic growth has resulted in a new social landscape of inequality and privilege, with deep fault lines between old-timers and newcomers. In this complicated cultural reality, “class blindness” allows privileged newcomers to ignore or justify their impact on these towns, papering over the sentiments of anger, loss, and disempowerment of longtime locals.
Natali Valdez
2023 Ludwik Fleck Prize, Shortlist
Society for Social Studies of Science
Natali Valdez is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College.
Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era
Epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in gene expression, has been heralded as one of the most promising new fields of scientific inquiry. Current large-scale studies selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. As the first ethnography of its kind, Weighing the Future examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction. Natali Valdez argues that a focus on individual behavior rather than social environments ignores the vital impacts of systemic racism. The environments we imagine to shape our genes, bodies, and future health are intimately tied to race, gender, and structures of inequality. This groundbreaking book makes the case that science, and how we translate it, is a reproductive project that requires feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, this book brings attention to the present at stake.
Jerry C. Zee
2023 Ludwik Fleck Prize, Honrable Mention
Society for Social Studies of Science
Jerry C. Zee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.
Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System
In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?
