Duke University Press Log

Congratulations to Our Award-Winning Authors

At this weekend's Latin American Studies Association conference, several of our books were honored with awards. Michelle Bigenho's Intimate Distance: Andean Music in Japan has won the Book Award from the LASA Section for Asia and the Americas. Paul Eiss has been awarded the LASA Mexico Section Book Award for his book In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatan. Jerry Dávila's Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980 has won the LASA Brazil Section Book Award. The Brazil section also awared Amy Chazkel Honorable Mention for her book Laws of Chance: Brazil's Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life. And Kathryn Burns received Honorable Mention for the LASA Bryce Wood Award for her book Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. 

Our authors were also honored at the Association of Asian Studies conference in March. Eleana Kim won the James Palais book prize from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies for her book Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. Yomi Braester's Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract was awarded the AAS China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) Levenson Prize for Books in Chinese Studies. And Karen Strassler's Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java has won the AAS Southeast Asia Council Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies. 

We also congratulate Carolyn Dean for winning the Association for Latin American Art Book Award for her book A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock. And Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism has won the 2012 René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. The 2012 Joel Gregory Prize from the Canadian Association of African Studies was awarded to Vinh-Kim Nguyen for his book The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa's Time of AIDS. And Sukanya Banerjee's Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late Victorian Empire has won the Northeast Victorian Studies Association Sonya Rudikoff Award for the best Victorian book by a first-time author.

Congratulations to all our award-winning authors!

"A Separation" Wins First Ever Oscar for an Iranian Film

Last night's Academy Award ceremonies brought great news to Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose film A Separation won the award for best foreign film. It is the first time that honor has gone to an Iranian film.

Movie watchers wanting to know more about Iranian cinema and the Iranian cinema industry can look to books by Negar Mottahedeh and Hamid Naficy for context. Mottahedeh's 2008 book Displaced Allegories looks at the role of women and gender in Iranian film. On the news of Farhadi's Oscar, she says, " I think it's a marvelous win and well deserved. A Separation's brilliant engagement with domesticity and the unliveability of life for women under the Islamic Republic aside, the film is a rare rendition of contemporary class conflict in Iran."

Hamid Naficy is the author of the four-volume definitive history of Iranian film and the filmmaking industy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema. Volume 4, The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010, covers recent Iranian film, and will be out this fall.  Naficy places the Farhadi's win in context: "Sixteen years after the nomination of Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, was nominated for the best foreign language Oscar.  Unlike Panahi’s film, this film is not part of the neorealist inflected, child-centered art-house "festival films," that became a veritable genre, even a cliché. A Separation is an adult film about adult issues, a powerful, provocative, and emotionally wrenching work that explores in an unflinching way divorce, child custody, care of Alzheimer parents, class division, and deceit and lying in Iran's postrevolutionary society. It is an example of the new social issues movies that critically dig below the surfaces, below "the skin of the city" to quote the title of a Banietemad film, to uncover a social cauldron.  The film’s closed mise-en-scène and tight shot composition enhance the feeling of seething tensions."

Hopefully this well-deserved Oscar will bring Iranian film to even more cinema fans.

 

Duke Books Honored in 2012 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show

Congratulations to designers Amy Ruth Buchanan and Heather Hensley and to our entire Editorial, Design and Production team for being recognized by the Association of American University Presses for their outstanding design work last year. Here are the honored titles.

Cruel Optmism, by Lauren Berlant, designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan.

 

The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Jane Gallop,

designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan. 

 

 

 

EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art by Kellie Jones, designed by Heather Hensley.

 

 

The Queer Art of Failure, by Judith Halberstam,

designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan. 

 

 

Soldiers' Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II by Yvonne Tasker, designed by Heather Hensley

 

 

 

 

Cutting across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law

edited by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli, designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan.

 

Award Winning Titles

Congratulations to our recent award-winning authors!

Paul K. Eiss has won the Mexican History Book Prize from the Conference on Latin American History for his book In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatán. 

 

Julie Chu's Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China was a co-winner of the American Ethnological Society's Sharon Stephens Prize. The prize is awarded to a junior scholar for their first book. It goes to a work that speaks to contemporary social issues with relevance beyond the discipline and beyond the academy. Alexander Edmonds's book Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil was granted an Honorable Mention for the award.

 

Federico Finchelstein was honored with the Best Book Prize by the New England Council of Latin American Studies for his book Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945. 

 

 

African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston by Randy Weston and arranged by Willard Jenkins won the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in the category of Best Research in Recorded Jazz Music. 

 

American Literature article wins Cohen Prize

Congratulations to Cody Marrs for winning the 2011 Hennig Cohen Prize for best essay in Melville Studies from the Melville Studies Association.  Marrs’ article,  “A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville's Poetic Turn,” appeared in the March 2010 issue of American Literature, and is available for free here. 

SAQ Receives the 2011 CELJ Award for Best Special Issue

“Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law,” edited by Eric Cheyfitz, N. Bruce Duthu, and Shari M. Huhndorf received the 2011 Best Special Issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Award for Best Special Issue.  The award was announced at last week’s MLA meeting, and was accepted on behalf of the journal by editor Michael Hardt.

The essays in “Sovereignty, Indigeneity and the Law” consider historical and contemporary colonial conflicts and explore key topics in Indigenous studies, including land rights, human rights, legal jurisdiction, Indigenous governance, and questions of language, culture, and the environment.

For more about the issue, visit dukeupress.edu/saq.

American Literature Essay Wins 2010 Walker Prize

Congratulations to Chadwick Allen who has been awarded the 2010 Don D. Walker Award from the Western Literature Association for the year's best essay in western American literary and cultural study for his essay,  “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run.” Prize committee members wrote of the essay:

“I find the piece simply spectacular, and so novel in the field of literary studies generally for its interests in mathematics, astronomy, and science of any kind… Chad Allen is well known as a deft close reader, but here he takes this skill to an exponentially new level.”

“ [H]is reading of Blood Run is brilliant in its illumination of how Hedge Coke’s mathematically precise form aligns with her argument about the importance of the mounds as both presence and trace. I really think he hits it out of the ballpark here by showing the ties between mathematics, science, Indigenous technologies, and literature.”

The essay appeared in volume 82:4 (December 2010) of American Literature, and is available for free here. 

Tiya Miles Wins MacArthur Award

We offer a huge congratulations to University of Michigan history professor Tiya Miles, who has won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Miles is a public historian whose research is on the relationships between African Americans and Cherokee peoples in colonial America. Miles is co-editor, with Sharon Holland, of our book Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. She also contributed a chapter to Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler. The MacArthur Fellows Program awards $500,000 to individuals of exceptional creativity and accomplishment. Congratulations again to Miles!

Congratulations to Our Recent Award Winners

We are pleased to announce that our authors have won several awards recently.

Tara Rodgers's Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound has won the Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music.

Karen Strassler's Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java has won the  Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. The prize rewards work "that is theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded, and in the spirit of the tradition for which the SCA has been known—interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative."

Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness has won the Book Prize from the Feminist and Women's Studies Association. The prize "aims to reward ingenuity and scholarship in the fields of feminism, gender or women’s studies."

Sandra McGee Deutsch's Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1955 has won the 2011 Book Award from the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.

Jerry Dávila's Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950–1980 has won the Alfred B. Thomas Award from Southeastern Conference on Latin American Studies.

Karen Engle's The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy has won the American Political Science Association Human Rights section Best Book Award.

Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz's edited collection The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement has won the Bronze Award from the Association for Borderland Studies. The prize committee citation says, "Scholars of borders and bordering are sure to profit from the meticulous dissection of the norms and mechanisms of sovereignty, space, citizenship, and humanity to be found in these pages."

Congratulations to all our prize-winning authors!

 

GL/Q Caucus Annual Awards

The GL/Q Caucus of the MLA invites nominations for each of our three annual awards:

 THE MICHAEL LYNCH SERVICE AWARD

This award serves not only to honor a GLBT academic activist every year, but also, in Eve Sedgwick's words, "to publicize and celebrate—and as widely as possible—the range, the forms, the energy, and the history of queer activism by academics." Michael Lynch wanted to honor those whose activism is academic in context but not limited to work for the Caucus or Division. This activism might consist of activities including (but not limited to) direct service to, or administrative advocacy on behalf of, LGBTQ students; action that results in non-discrimination clauses in contracts; working to establish domestic partner benefits, awareness of transgender issues in housing and health services, or other LGBT-friendly campus policies; facilitating connections between campus and LGBT community activists; or other forms of campus, public, or media activism. Lynch also wanted the award to offer a way that, in Eve Sedgwick's words, "the achievements and struggles of each of the generations of lesbian/gay scholars who are currently active could become more visible to the others."

 Nominations for this award, including a summary of the nominee’s qualifications, may be submitted to Committee Chair Scarlet Bowen at Scarlet.Bowen@Colorado.EDU no later than November 1, 2011.

 THE ALAN BRAY MEMORIAL BOOK AWARD

Named in honor of a scholar whose two landmark books have been profoundly influential in gay and lesbian studies, the Bray Award will be given to the best book in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, all broadly construed.

Eligibility: all books must bear a 2010 copyright date.

Deadline: all books must be received by November 1, 2011.

 To nominate your own book, contact your editor and have him or her email Committee Chair Richard T. Rodriguez at rtrodrig@illinois.edu

To nominate someone else's book, contact the author with this info (or, if necessary, email the nomination to Richard T. Rodriguez).  Direct contact from an editor is preferred.

 THE CROMPTON-NOLL AWARD

The Crompton-Noll Award for best essay in lesbian, gay, queer studies in the modern languages/literatures pays tribute to Louis Crompton, who passed away in 2009, and Dolores Noll (Kent State University), two early scholar/activists who helped found the gay and lesbian caucus of the MLA. The award recognizes the important work of lesbian, gay, and queer studies in the modern languages and the history that has helped make this current work possible.

 Essays published between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011 may be submitted by email attachment to Committee Chair Kenneth B. Kidd at kbkidd@ufl.edu no later than November 1, 2011.

 Winners will be announced at the GL/Q Caucus cash bar during the MLA Convention in Seattle.