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A study of oil-rich Alberta reveals the entwined relationships among geoscience, governance, and power.

The Canadian province of Alberta holds the world’s fourth-largest reserve of fossil fuels, with oil sands famous for bitumen, a viscous form of petroleum. A critical testing ground for international environmental ideas and energy policies, Alberta pioneered state-led efforts to understand, extract, and sell bitumen. Without natural access to ocean ports, Alberta must negotiate pipeline routes with neighboring provinces and nations to reach global markets. But Alberta is also landlocked in another sense: it is caught in an extractive relationship with oil-rich earth.

In Landlocked, Jeremy J. Schmidt focuses on Alberta’s energy industry, particularly its use of water and oil, to argue for a new way of understanding how political authority is forged and maintained through the environment. Schmidt details how water and oil were enrolled in early state-making projects, such as irrigation, and examines the consequences of Alberta’s efforts to extract value from land, including a series of events in 2013 that released 4.2 million barrels of bitumen into underground environments. By uncovering the ways that geosciences supported activities—from land settlement to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples—that produced environmental policies and approaches to management and governance, he shows that they aren’t merely instruments of state power but central to Alberta’s political identity and legitimacy.

2026 Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History
2026 María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History, Conference on Latin American History
2026 Honorable Mention, Environment Section of the Latin American Studies Association

A history of the Purépecha people's survival amid environmental and political changes.

Landscapes are more than geological formations; they are living records of human struggles. Landscaping Indigenous Mexico unearths the history of Juátarhu, an Indigenous landscape shaped and nurtured by the Purépecha—a formidable Mesoamerican people whose power once rivaled that of the Aztecs. Although cataclysmic changes came with European contact and colonization, Juátarhu’s enduring agroecology continued to sustain local life through centuries of challenges.

Contesting essentialist narratives of Indigenous penury, Pérez Montesinos shows how Purépechas thrived after Mexican independence in 1821, using Juátarhu’s diverse agroecology to negotiate continued autonomy amid waves of national economic and political upheaval. After 1870, however, autonomy waned under the pressure of land privatization policies, state intervention, and industrial logging. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Purépechas stood at a critical juncture: Would the Indigenous landscape endure or succumb? Offering a fresh perspective on a seemingly well-worn subject, Pérez Montesinos argues that Michoacán, long considered a peripheral revolutionary region, saw one of the era’s most radical events: the destruction of the liberal order and the timber capitalism of Juátarhu.

The Covid pandemic has put all modern societies to a serious test of resilience. The interdisciplinary research on which this book is based examined how four European governments behaved in these circumstances. During the months of the crisis, the team of experts coordinated by the editors of this volume took a close look at the decision-making processes in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia – the so-called Visegrad Four.

The inquiries focused on experiences from the academic, health, economic and social fields. The methods of comparison included surveys, interviews, discourse analysis, for which the adaptive leadership theory provided the conceptual framework.

The conclusions are both academic and practical. Aside the description of the pandemic responses, the research had a formative dimension: how can an adaptive leadership approach better help societies manage the health and societal impacts of similar challenges? The spectrum of emerging anti-democratic tendencies in the region provided the specific context of the exercise. The four states face varying degrees of democratic backsliding as well as illiberal influences that have affected their response to the pandemic, which gives this research on the Visegrad Four a worldwide resonance.

Lobbying for Higher Education is about how the major higher education associations and the constituent American colleges and universities try to influence federal policy, especially congressional policy. In clear prose Cook explains how the higher education community organizes itself in Washington, how it lobbies, and how its major interest groups are perceived both by their own members and by public officials. The book focuses on the crucial development in 1995-1996 of a new lobbying paradigm, which included the greater use of campus-based resources and ad hoc coalitions. The most engrossing part of its story is higher education's creative response to the policy turmoil and disruption of the status quo that resulted from the shift in congressional party control.

The author, Constance Cook, uses sources unique to this project: over 1,500 survey responses from college and university presidents (a 62% return rate) and nearly 150 interviews with institutional and association leaders. Fortuitously, the 1994 electoral upheaval provided her with an opportunity to capture, analyze, and interpret the responses of her subjects in a period of unusually sweeping change.

Lobbying for Higher Education is a timely book with an interesting and important story at its core.