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2026 IPPY Awards Bronze Medal Winner, Current Events - Social Issues/Humanitarian
2026 PROSE Award Finalist, Humanities: Literature

Artifact is about the stories we tell ourselves after mass shootings. Each college campus shooting leaves a record: archival collections, monuments to the dead, government-led inquiries, internal university investigations, and lawsuits. Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives seeks to understand university and college campus shootings that involve students and faculty of those institutions. The book examines the aftermaths of such attacks by moving between university archives, memorials to victims, conversations with survivors, and beyond.

Julija Šukys examines a series of five North American university and college campus shootings between 1966 and 2015: the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Concordia University in Montreal, Virginia Tech, University of Alabama–Huntsville, and Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. These attacks involved students and faculty as both victims and perpetrators—that is, all the shooters were either faculty members or (in one case, would-be) students of the institution where the killings took place.

Šukys arrives at each site long after the killings have taken place: by now, the teddy bears, flowers, and crosses have been cleared away. Prying journalists are long gone. She sorts through myriad objects left at makeshift memorial sites. She talks for hours with a professor who survived an attack only because her colleague’s gun jammed as it was pointed at her head. She wanders and documents the reconfigured buildings made unrecognizable after the horrors that occurred within them. She reads tedious court transcripts, officious government-commissioned reports, and a troubling memoir written by a shooter’s mother and sifts through the mathematics papers that one campus shooter publishes from his prison cell.

Artifact weighs what it means to live in a place where students and their teachers are gunned down on a seemingly regular basis. It asks how we can continue to learn, teach, and live when nothing changes in response to these deaths. It attempts to speak into silence, to look at the pain of those who have come through trauma, and to meet their gazes without platitudes or triumphalism. The result is a searching book about care, memory, forgiveness, and survival.

Oaxaca is internationally renowned for its marketplaces and archaeological sites where tourists can buy inexpensive folk art, including replicas of archaeological treasures. Archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals sometimes discredit this trade in “fakes” that occasionally make their way to the auction block as antiquities. Others argue that these souvenirs represent a long cultural tradition of woodcarving or clay sculpting and are “genuine” artifacts of artisanal practices that have been passed from generation to generation, allowing community members to preserve their cultural practices and make a living. Exploring the intriguing question of authenticity and its relationship to cultural forms in Oaxaca and throughout southern Mexico, Between Art and Artifact confronts an important issue that has implications well beyond the commercial realm.

Demonstrating that identity politics lies at the heart of the controversy, Ronda Brulotte provides a nuanced inquiry into what it means to present “authentic” cultural production in a state where indigenous ethnicity is part of an awkward social and racial classification system. Emphasizing the world-famous woodcarvers of Arrazola and the replica purveyors who come from the same community, Brulotte presents the ironies of an ideology that extols regional identity but shuns its artifacts as “forgeries.” Her work makes us question the authority of archaeological discourse in the face of local communities who may often see things differently. A departure from the dialogue that seeks to prove or disprove “authenticity,” Between Art and Artifact reveals itself as a commentary on the arguments themselves, and what the controversy can teach us about our shifting definitions of authority and authorship.