UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are several of our November 2023 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Reyhan Durmaz
2023 Book Prize, Honorable Mention
Middle East Medievalists
Reyhan Durmaz is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-translator of Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met.
Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond
Stories between Christianity and Islam offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Here, the late antique and medieval Near East is viewed as a world of stories shared by Christians and Muslims. Public storytelling was a key feature for these late antique Christian and early Islamic communities, where stories of saints were used to interpret the past, comment on the present, and envision the future.
Sarah Federman
2023 Porchlight Business Book Award, Winner
Big Ideas & New Perspectives
Sarah Federman (http://www.sarahfederman.com) is Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies. Federman is the author of several books including the award-winning Last Train to Auschwitz: The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability. She comes to this work after a decade as an international advertising executive negotiating in over 10 countries with companies such as Google, Discovery, Bloomberg, and the NFL.
Transformative Negotiation: Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures
Transformative Negotiation advances an understanding of power and oppression as core to negotiation, arguing that negotiation is central to social mobility and social change. Bringing theory into action, the book explores the real-world examples that Sarah Federman’s own students bring to class, such as negotiating with courts to get their kids back or with the IRS to reduce late fees.
Janet Garcia-Hallet
2023 New Scholar Award, Winner
ASC Division of Feminist Criminology
Janet Garcia-Hallett, an Afro-Latina mother and a product of Harlem, is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven’s Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences.
Invisible Mothers: Unseen Yet Hypervisible after Incarceration
Drawing on interviews conducted throughout New York City, Black feminist criminologist Janet Garcia-Hallett shares the traditionally silenced voices of formerly incarcerated mothers of color and exposes the difficult realities they face when reentering the community and navigating motherhood. Patriarchy, misogyny, and systemic racism marginalize and criminalize these mothers, pushing them into the grasp of penal control and forcing them to live in a state of disempowerment and hypersurveillance after imprisonment.
Helena Hansen
2023 New Millennium Book Award, Winner
Society for Medical Anthropology
Helena Hansen is an addiction psychiatrist and anthropologist and Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.
David Herzberg
2023 New Millennium Book Award, Winner
Society for Medical Anthropology
David Herzberg is a historian and Professor of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.
Munira Khayyat
2023 Edie Turner Prize for First Book in Ethnographic Writing, Winner
Society for Humanistic Anthropology, of the American Anthropological Association
Munira Khayyat teaches Anthropology at the American University in Cairo.
A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon
What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on.
Jules Netherland
2023 New Millennium Book Award, Winner
Society for Medical Anthropology
Jules Netherland is a sociologist and policy advocate and Managing Director of the Department of Research and Academic Engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance.
Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America
In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.
Nomi Stone
2023 Albert Hourani Award, Honorable Mention
Middle East Studies Association
Nomi Stone is an award-winning anthropologist and poet. An Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas, she was most recently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton. She is author of two ethnographic collections of poetry, Stranger’s Notebook and Kill Class, and her poems appear in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, and widely elsewhere.
Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire
Across the pine forests and deserts of America, there are mock Middle Eastern villages, mostly hidden from public view. Containing mosques, restaurants, street signs, graffiti in Arabic, and Iraqi role-players, these villages serve as military training sites for cultural literacy and special operations, both seen as crucial to victory in the Global War on Terror. In her gripping and highly original ethnography, anthropologist Nomi Stone explores US military predeployment training exercises and the lifeworlds of the Iraqi role-players employed within the mock villages, as they act out to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary or ally. Spanning fieldwork across the United States and Jordan, Pinelandia traces the devastating consequences of a military project that seeks to turn human beings into wartime technologies recruited to translate, mediate, and collaborate. Theorizing and enacting a field poetics, this work enlarges the ethnographic project into new cross-disciplinary worlds. Pinelandia is a political phenomenology of American empire and Iraq in the twenty-first century.
Armond R. Towns
2023 ARSTM Book Award, Finalist
Association for Rhetoric of Science, Technology & Medicine
Armond R. Towns is an Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.
On Black Media Philosophy
Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy.
Natali Valdez
2023 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, Winner
Society for Medical Anthropology, Americam Anthropological Association
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.
Cecilia Coale Van Hollen
2023 Book Prize, Honorable Mention
Council on the Anthropology of Reproduction
Cecilia Coale Van Hollen is a medical anthropologist and Teaching Professor in the Asian Studies Program of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is the author of Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India and Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India.
Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India
As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen’s critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women’s narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.
Mareike Winchell
2023 Annual Book Award, Honorable Mention
Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Mareike Winchell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia
How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude explores how agrarian engineers, Indigenous farmers, Mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from Mestizo elites and, when that fails, through acts of labor militancy. Against institutional faith in property ownership as a means to detach land from people and present from past, the kin of former masters and servants alike have insisted that ethical debts from earlier racial violence stretch across epochs and formal land sales. What emerges is a vision of justice grounded in popular demands that wealth remain beholden to the region’s agrarian past. By tracing Ayopayans’ active efforts to contend with servitude’s long shadow, Mareike Winchell illuminates the challenges that property confronts as both an extractive paradigm and a means of historical redress.
