As we look back on 2018, we will be sharing our proudest moments here at the University of Texas Press. As a testament to the high-quality scholarship our authors have produced and the heroic efforts by our editorial staff, we are pleased to highlight the books, below, that have earned awards or distinctions in 2018.
"This volume is a foundational landmark, and can be used to teach students both at undergraduate and graduate levels to provide guidance for how to conduct and publish future archaeological research."
—Antiquity
Tom Dillehay’s Where the Land Meets the Sea: Fourteen Millennia of Human History at Huaca Prieta, Peru
2018 Society for American Archaeology's Book Award"This volume is a foundational landmark, and can be used to teach students both at undergraduate and graduate levels to provide guidance for how to conduct and publish future archaeological research."
—Antiquity
American Studies
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Stacy I. Morgan's Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America
2018 Wayland D. Hand Prize (co-winner)
“I am extremely impressed by this book. I think it will be a valuable addition to African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, and popular culture studies.”
“I am extremely impressed by this book. I think it will be a valuable addition to African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, and popular culture studies.”
—James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance
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Music
Holly Gleason’s Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives
2018 Belmont Award for the Best Book on Country Music“Woman Walk the Line radiates heartfelt sincerity, revealing how women in country music—world-famous and little-known, black and white, vintage and contemporary—helped shape the lives of many different kinds of women. It’s concrete evidence that country should and does belong just as much to women as to men.”
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Photography
Dawoud Bey's Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply
Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist"Photographs from all of Bey’s major projects are presented in chronological sequence, allowing viewers to see how the collective body of portraits and recent landscapes create an unparalleled historical representation of various communities in the United States."
—Photo-eye Blog
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Classics and Ancient World
Jeffrey M. Hunt, R. Alden Smith, and Fabio Stok’s Classics from Papyrus to the Internet: An Introduction to Transmission and Reception
2018 AAP Prose Awards, Classics Category
"Hunt, Smith, and Stok have produced a valuable and useful book…Especially as Classics continues to be a source of interest and even contention in the public eye, the history of the field should remain of vital interest to students…The present volume offers a rich and engaging starting point."
—New England Classical Journal
Middle Eastern Studies
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Ahmed Naji’s Using LifeIllustrations by Ayman Al Zorkany, translated by Benjamin Koerber
2018 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards Shortlist
“Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.”
—Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books
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Camila Pastor's The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate
2018 Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies
“A groundbreaking work that presents the social configuration of Arabic-speaking migrants and their descendants in a new and revelatory light. This study stands to be an excellent example of a global, connected colonial approach to migration and nationalism. It reconfigures Latin American and Middle Eastern studies in a sound and compelling way, highlighting the ways in which Mexico and the Levant participate in, and interact with, the same structures of power.”
—Christina Civantos, University of Miami, author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity
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Film, Media & Popular Culture
Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant’s Hysterical! Women in American Comedy
2018 Susan Koppleman Award for Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies, Popular and American Culture Associations (PACA)
"Here to meet all your funny female deep-read needs . . . a juicy read for those who love the many ways female comics use their art to question the patriarchy."
—BUST
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Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis’s Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics
2018 Best Academic/Scholarly work, Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Shortlist
“Picturing Childhood is a much needed and long-awaited interdisciplinary project that looks at representations of children throughout the history of comics.”
—Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature
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Jennifer Fronc's Monitoring the Movies: The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America
2017 Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist (Theatre Library Association)“Not unlike Facebook, the nascent movie industry resisted regulation; it fought back with self-imposed guidelines aided by the rhetoric of civil libertarians. . . . Fronc has written an engaging and balanced account of questions whose debating points remain relevant today.”
—Shepherd Express
2018 AAP Prose Awards, Biological Anthropology, Ancient History & Archaeology category
2018 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize
2017 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Honorable Mention
2018 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize
2017 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Honorable Mention
“This volume goes a long way toward explaining and interpreting Inca khipus as encoded political, social, ritual, and economic structures, and as such, is essential reading not only for all Peruvianists and students of ancient civilizations but also, because of the book's code-breaking arguments related to binary coding, hierarchy, and markedness, for scholars in those areas as well.”
—Choice
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Harper Montgomery’s The Mobility of Modernism: Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America
2018 Annual Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation Margaret Arvey Book Award
“Deeply researched and passionately argued, this book is a model for effective transnational scholarship. Much like her protagonists, Montgomery is a visionary.”
—Tatiana Flores, Rutgers University, author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30!
2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award
“A rich history of how race was conceptualized and materially inscribed in colonial Mexico—and a pleasure to read. The book’s contributions are manifold, and it will be in conversation with other books in the field, while expanding the discussions with which the colonial period can engage.”
—Ivonne del Valle, University of California, Berkeley
2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award, Honorable Mention
“Incredibly smart, well-articulated, and very much needed. REMEX is not only an important contribution to the fields of Mexican and border visual cultural and performance studies, but it is the book that will move the conversations in the fields in new and provocative ways. It is the book many of us have been waiting for.”
—Laura G. Gutiérrez, University of Texas at Austin, author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage
“A rich history of how race was conceptualized and materially inscribed in colonial Mexico—and a pleasure to read. The book’s contributions are manifold, and it will be in conversation with other books in the field, while expanding the discussions with which the colonial period can engage.”
—Ivonne del Valle, University of California, Berkeley
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Amy Sara Carroll’s REMEX: Toward and Art History of the NAFTA Era
2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award, Honorable Mention
2017 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Honorable Mention
“Incredibly smart, well-articulated, and very much needed. REMEX is not only an important contribution to the fields of Mexican and border visual cultural and performance studies, but it is the book that will move the conversations in the fields in new and provocative ways. It is the book many of us have been waiting for.”
—Laura G. Gutiérrez, University of Texas at Austin, author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage
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John Lear’s Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico 1908–1940
2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award, Honorable Mention
“This superb study intertwines a history of artistic representations of Mexican workers on public walls and in labor publications with that of the artists who produced them. I know of no other work that attempts such an endeavor and, though it is an ambitious project, it is most successful. The wide swath cut by Lear makes the book important for a broad audience: those interested in the history of Mexico, the history of Mexican labor, and the history of Mexican art. The scholarship is impeccable.”—John Mraz, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, author of Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons
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“Kuxlejal Politics is a most eloquent testimony to the dynamic Zapatista struggle and to what an engaged academy can do when it genuinely walks along the paths of subaltern groups intent on defending their worlds. By theorizing and embodying a farsighted vision of decolonized and decolonizing research, Mora renews our commitment to the idea that another academy is possible and practicable. This work is a gift to us all by one of the most inventive exponents of Mexican anthropology at present, in the best tradition of Latin American critical thought.”
—Arturo Escobar, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Robert W. Wilcox’s Cattle in the Backlands: Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching in the Brazilian Tropics
2018 Henry A. Wallace Award, The Agricultural History Society
“This book fills a large hole in historical scholarship. English-language treatments of ranching history anywhere in Brazil are few and far between. It also makes a strong case for the importance of linking agro-pastoral studies to environmental specificity and to careful consideration of labor practices.”
—Thomas D. Rogers, Emory University, author of the award-winning book The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil
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Isabel M. Córdova’s Pushing in Silence: Modernizing Puerto Rico and the Medicalization of Childbirth
2018 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize“A brilliantly written, accessible, and comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted social, cultural, and historical conditions that led to the medicalization of birthing in Puerto Rico, which enabled doctors to replace midwives. This history has not been written before. The research is original and unique and is a contribution to the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, and biomedicine.”
—Iris O. Lopez, City College of New York, author of Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom
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Patricia Acerbi’s Street Occupations: Urban Vending in Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1925
2017 Warren Dean Memorial Prize in Brazilian Studies, Conference on Latin American History“This book makes a huge contribution to our understanding of street life and commerce in Rio de Janeiro and to the transition from flexible slavery to radically unequal freedom. Acerbi’s research is extensive and groundbreaking.”
—Bryan McCann, Georgetown University, author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro
