Results by title

2026 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno First Book Award Shortlist Finalist

A Beautiful Fight examines the potentials and limits of capoeira Angola to cohere a multiracial community committed to antiracist struggle. Capoeira, a musical fight-game that originated among enslaved Africans in Brazil, holds special significance for Black Brazilian activists as a spiritual and political practice that affirms the value of Black lives, thus countering anti-Black violence sanctioned by the Brazilian state. However, many capoeira groups count more white practitioners than Black, especially groups of the politicized, Afrocentric style capoeira Angola, raising debates about appropriation of Black culture that resonate across the Americas. A Beautiful Fight addresses these tensions. Drawing on ethnographic research with a multiracial capoeira Angola group in Brazil’s Bahian sertão or backlands, Esther Viola Kurtz explores diverse group members’ understandings of capoeira’s spiritual and political meanings and considers how white participation impacts capoeira’s antiracist politics. A Beautiful Fight argues that white practitioners occupying space in capoeira divert attention from Black members’ concerns and reproduce racist and colonialist ideologies, albeit unintentionally. In this way, the book complicates claims that shared music and dance bridge differences and facilitate cross-racial unity, yet Kurtz proposes that capoeira still transmits knowledge and tools that, when used with intention, commitment, and care, can be wielded to collaboratively contest racism and imagine a more just world.

2026 Silver Medal for the Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
2026 Honorable Mention, Book Award, Social History Society
2025 Best Book in Social Sciences Award, Southern Cone Section, Latin American Studies Association
2024 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies, The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY

A history of Argentina that examines how trans bodies were understood, policed, and shaped in a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives.

As a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One’s Own places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and community-based archives, this book explores the mainstream medical and media portrayals of trans or travesti people, the state policing of gender embodiment, the experiences of those transgressing the boundaries of gender, and the development of homemade technologies from prosthetics to the self-injection of silicone. A Body of One's Own explores how trans activists' challenges to the exclusionary effects of Argentina’s legal, cultural, social, and political cisgender order led to the passage of the Gender Identity Law in 2012. Analyzing the decisive yet overlooked impact of gender transformation in the formation of the nation-state, gender-belonging, and citizenship, this book ultimately shows that supposedly abstract struggles to define the shifting notions of "sex," citizenship, and nationhood are embodied material experiences.

Since the late nineteenth century, Brazilians have turned to documentaries to explain their country to themselves and to the world. In a magisterial history covering one hundred years of cinema, Darlene J. Sadlier identifies Brazilians’ unique contributions to a diverse genre while exploring how that genre has, in turn, contributed to the making and remaking of Brazil.

A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film is a comprehensive tour of feature and short films that have charted the social and political story of modern Brazil. The Amazon appears repeatedly and vividly. Sometimes—as in a prize-winning 1922 feature—the rainforest is a galvanizing site of national pride; at other times, the Amazon has been a focus for land-reform and Indigenous-rights activists. Other key documentary themes include Brazil’s swings from democracy to dictatorship, tensions between cosmopolitanism and rurality, and shifting attitudes toward race and gender. Sadlier also provides critical perspectives on aesthetics and media technology, exploring how documentaries inspired dramatic depictions of poverty and migration in the country’s Northeast and examining Brazilians’ participation in streaming platforms that have suddenly democratized filmmaking.

The New Deal introduced sweeping social, political, and cultural change across the United States, which Hollywood embraced enthusiastically. Then, when the heady idealism of the 1930s was replaced by the paranoia of the postwar years, Hollywood became an easy target for the anticommunists. A Divided World examines some of the important programs of the New Deal and the subsequent response of the film community—especially in relation to social welfare, women’s rights, and international affairs. The book also provides an analysis of the major works of three European directors—Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang—compared and contrasted with the products of mainstream Hollywood. This is a new interpretation of an influential period in American film history and it is sure to generate further debate and scholarship.

The “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city’s downtown. Working-class residents and people of color saw their neighborhoods cleared and replaced with upscale, white residents and with large corporations housed in massive skyscrapers. Pittsburgh’s Renaissance’s apparent success quickly became a model for several struggling industrial cities, including St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia. 

In A Good Place to Do Business, Roger Biles and Mark Rose chronicle these urban “makeovers” which promised increased tourism and fashionable shopping as well as the development of sports stadiums, convention centers, downtown parks, and more. They examine the politics of these government-funded redevelopment programs and show how city politics (and policymakers) often dictated the level of success. 

As city officials and business elites determined to reorganize their downtowns, a deeply racialized politics sacrificed neighborhoods and the livelihoods of those pushed out. Yet, as A Good Place to Do Business demonstrates, more often than not, costly efforts to bring about the hoped-for improvements failed to revitalize those cities, or even their downtowns.

Since its founding in 1846 “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” the Smithsonian Institution has been an important feature of the American cultural landscape. In A Living Exhibition, William S. Walker examines the tangled history of cultural exhibition at the Smithsonian from its early years to the chartering of the National Museum of the American Indian in 1989. He tracks the transformation of the institution from its original ideal as a “universal museum” intended to present the totality of human experience to the variegated museum and research complex of today.

Walker pays particular attention to the half century following World War II, when the Smithsonian significantly expanded. Focusing on its exhibitions of cultural history, cultural anthropology, and folk life, he places the Smithsonian within the larger context of Cold War America and the social movements of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. Organized chronologically, the book uses the lens of the Smithsonian's changing exhibitions to show how institutional decisions become intertwined with broader public debates about pluralism, multiculturalism, and decolonization. 

Yet if a trend toward more culturally specific museums and exhibitions characterized the postwar history of the institution, its leaders and curators did not abandon the vision of the universal museum. Instead, Walker shows, even as the Smithsonian evolved into an extensive complex of museums, galleries, and research centers, it continued to negotiate the imperatives of cultural convergence as well as divergence, embodying both a desire to put everything together and a need to take it all apart.

A People's History of the Second World War unearths the fascinating history of the war as fought 'from below'. Until now, the vast majority of historical accounts have focussed on the conflict between the Allied and Axis powers for imperialist mastery. Donny Gluckstein shows that in fact between 1939 and 1945 two distinct wars were fought – one ‘from above’ and one ‘from below’.

Using examples from countries under the Nazi heel, in the colonies and within the Axis and Allied camps, Gluckstein brings to life the very different struggle of the people's and resistance movements which proliferated during the war. He shows how they fought not just fascism, but colonialism and empire, and were betrayed by the Allies at the war’s end.

This book will fundamentally challenge our understanding of the Second World War – both about the people who fought it and the reasons for which it was fought.

After its early introduction into the English colonies in North America, slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.  But increasingly during the contested politics of the early republic, abolitionists cried out that the Constitution itself was a slaveowners’ document, produced to protect and further their rights. A Slaveholders’ Union furthers this unsettling claim by demonstrating once and for all that slavery was indeed an essential part of the foundation of the nascent republic.

In this powerful book, George William Van Cleve demonstrates that the Constitution was pro-slavery in its politics, its economics, and its law. He convincingly shows that the Constitutional provisions protecting slavery were much more than mere “political” compromises—they were integral to the principles of the new nation. By the late 1780s, a majority of Americans wanted to create a strong federal republic that would be capable of expanding into a continental empire. In order for America to become an empire on such a scale, Van Cleve argues, the Southern states had to be willing partners in the endeavor, and the cost of their allegiance was the deliberate long-term protection of slavery by America’s leaders through the nation’s early expansion. Reconsidering the role played by the gradual abolition of slavery in the North, Van Cleve also shows that abolition there was much less progressive in its origins—and had much less influence on slavery’s expansion—than previously thought.

Deftly interweaving historical and political analyses, A Slaveholders’ Union will likely become the definitive explanation of slavery’s persistence and growth—and of its influence on American constitutional development—from the Revolutionary War through the Missouri Compromise of 1821.

Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A “lean, straggly-haired New Yorker,” as Time magazine called him, Gellert was an independent music collector, without formal training, credentials, or affiliation. At a time of institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been denied and overlooked by prior white collectors.

By the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a fabrication—an example of left-wing propaganda and white interference. A Sound History is the story of an individual life, an excavation of African American musical resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle decades of the U.S. twentieth century.

A data-rich examination of the US Supreme Court's unprecedented detachment from the democratic processes that buttress its legitimacy.

Today’s Supreme Court is unlike any other in American history. This is not just because of its jurisprudence but also because the current Court has a tenuous relationship with the democratic processes that help establish its authority. Historically, this “democracy gap” was not nearly as severe as it is today. Simply put, past Supreme Courts were constructed in a fashion far more in line with the promise of democracy—that the people decide and the majority rules.

Drawing on historical and contemporary data alongside a deep knowledge of court battles during presidencies ranging from FDR to Donald Trump, Kevin J. McMahon charts the developments that brought us here. McMahon offers insight into the altered politics of nominating and confirming justices, the shifting pool of Supreme Court hopefuls, and the increased salience of the Court in elections. A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other is an eye-opening account of today’s Court within the context of US history and the broader structure of contemporary politics.

As a changing climate threatens the whole country with deeper droughts and more furious floods that put ever more people and property at risk, Texas has become a bellwether state for water debates. Will there be enough water for everyone? Is there the will to take the steps necessary to defend ourselves against the sea? Is it in the nature of Americans to adapt to nature in flux?

The most comprehensive—and comprehensible—book on contemporary water issues, A Thirsty Land delves deep into the challenges faced not just by Texas but by the nation as a whole, as we struggle to find a way to balance the changing forces of nature with our own ever-expanding needs. Part history, part science, part adventure story, and part travelogue, this book puts a human face on the struggle to master that most precious and capricious of resources, water. Seamus McGraw goes to the taproots, talking to farmers, ranchers, businesspeople, and citizen activists, as well as to politicians and government employees. Their stories provide chilling evidence that Texas—and indeed the nation—is not ready for the next devastating drought, the next catastrophic flood. Ultimately, however, A Thirsty Land delivers hope. This deep dive into one of the most vexing challenges facing Texas and the nation offers glimpses of the way forward in the untapped opportunities that water also presents.

A nuanced reassessment of US democratic responsiveness and public opinion on economic policy that explores the real reasons government does not do more to mitigate inequality.

Many believe that the United States’ growing economic inequality is the result of a political system that has been captured by wealthy elites. But is economic capture actually the problem? In A Tolerance for Inequality, Andrew J. Taylor examines this question from multiple angles, drawing on public opinion data and analyses of representation in Congress. Taylor finds that economic policy outcomes are more reflective of public opinion than the common wisdom suggests.

Broadly, less-affluent Americans’ policy preferences are not meaningfully different from the preferences of other Americans, and Washington is responsive to these preferences. Although politicians are more affluent, on average, than most Americans, this does not prevent them from representing the economic views of their poorer constituents. Today’s Democratic Party is more interested in regulation and supplying public goods than redistributing wealth downwards, and political reforms designed to provide more equal outcomes are largely misguided. In short, Americans get the kind of economy they at least say they want.

Demonstrates the role of Beirut’s postwar graffiti and street art in transforming the cityscape and animating resistance.

Over the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physical and social spaces. In A War of Colors, Nadine Sinno examines how graffiti and street art have been used in postwar Beirut to comment on the rapidly changing social dynamics of the country and region. Analyzing how graffiti makers can reclaim and transform cityscapes that were damaged or monopolized by militias during the war, Sinno explores graffiti’s other roles, including forging civic engagement, commemorating cultural icons, protesting political corruption and environmental violence, and animating resistance. In addition, she argues that graffiti making can offer voices to those who are often marginalized, especially women and LGBTQ people. Copiously illustrated with images of graffiti and street art, A War of Colors is a visually captivating and thought-provoking journey through Beirut, where local and global discourses intersect on both scarred and polished walls in the city.