Humanities

Joseph Boone, Gender Studies Professor in Media and Gender and professor of English and comparative literature, has won the 2023 Next Generation Indie Awards for First Novel (Over 90,000 Words) for Furnace Creek (Black Spring Press, 2023). The Next Generation Indie Awards is the world’s largest nonprofit awards program for independent publishers. Boone and other winners will be honored at a June 23 ceremony at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Furnace Creek also received an Eric Hoffer Award honorable mention in the general fiction category and was a finalist in Foreward’s Indie Book of the Year competition for LGBT+ fiction.

Jessica Marglin, Ruth Ziegler Chair in Jewish Studies and professor of religion, law and history, has been awarded the James Willard Hurst Book Prize by the Law and Society Association for The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship Across the Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2022). The prize recognizes “the best work in socio-legal history published in the previous year.”

Marglin also received the The Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize for The Shamama Case. The prize recognizes the best scholarly and trade publications published from 2020 through 2022, focusing on books that broke new ground conceptually or methodologically, were comparative or interdisciplinary and that emphasized the intercultural, interregional and inter-religious contact of the Mediterranean.

Hiram Sims, adjunct assistant professor of the practice of English, has been appointed Library Board Commissioner of the Los Angeles Public Library system by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and confirmed by the city council. The Board of Commissioners serves as the legal head of the library department with the power to make and enforce all necessary and desirable rules and regulations.

Norbert Schwarz, Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing, received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the Attitudes and Social Influence Interest Section of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) at the SPSP Annual Convention. The prestigious award honors psychologists who have made major theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of attitudes, persuasion, and social influence throughout their academic careers.

Chris Belcher, assistant professor (teaching) of writing and gender and sexuality studies, has earned the 2023–2024 Barnard Library Research Award for her book project based on the Scholar and Feminist Conference IX, “Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” held at Barnard College in 1982.

Joshua Goldstein, professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures, received the Joseph Levenson Prize (China, Post-1900) for his book Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing (University of California Press, 2020). Presented annually by the Association for Asian Studies, the prize recognizes English-language books that made the greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics or economy of China.

Robin Coste Lewis, writer-in-residence, has been awarded an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry for her new collection To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022). The annual NAACP Image Awards aim to uplift values that inspire equality, justice and progressive change, and highlight artists committed to these values.

Daphne Oyserman, Dean’s Professor of Psychology and professor of psychology and education, has been elected a member of Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina, Germany’s National Academy of Sciences. The Leopoldina, which comprises about 1,600 members, represents German science in international committees and takes an independent and public position on the scientific foundations of political and social issues.

The SPSA announced the Joseph Bernd award at its January meeting, stating: ‘Social Lobbying’ by Christian Grose, Pamela Lopez, Sara Sadhwani and Antoine Yoshinaka, investigates the impact of direct social lobbying on the likelihood that lawmakers will support a given interest group’s preferred policy.