2024 Book Award Winners

We are pleased to announce that the AAAS Book Awards Committee and its panel of jurors has officially completed adjudicating the nominations for the 2024 book awards cycle. We are very grateful to the AAAS staff for facilitating the nomination process and publicity.

We extend our deep appreciation to our exemplary judges who reviewed dozens of submissions within a 6-month period. The AAAS Book Awards are only possible through the active participation and volunteerism of members, as well as presses and authors.

The AAAS Book Awards is an opportunity for the author’s work to be publicly honored as exceptional and deserving of special recognition. It’s also a process that allows our Association to deeply appreciate the years of research, writing, analyzing, and theorizing infused in the projects represented. The books nominated prove the vibrancy of Asian American studies scholarship and writing, and the field’s indispensable contribution to understandings of everyday survival, world-historic change, planetary struggle, axes of solidarity, and much more.

To all those nominated: Thank you for the work and giving the process such depth. To the awardees: Congratulations and we look forward to honoring you and celebrating your accomplishments in Seattle!

Chair:
Francis Tanglao Aguas (Drexel University)

Members:
Shalini Shankar (Northwestern University)
Rishi Ramesh Gune (University of California, Irvine)

Creative Writing: Poetry

Outstanding Achievement: Indecent Hours by James Fujinami Moore
Honorable Mention: Customs by Solmaz Sharif
Honorable Mention: All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran

Creative Writing: Prose

Outstanding Achievement: Nuclear Family by Joseph Han
Honorable Mention: Mother Ocean Father Nation by Nishant Batsha

History

Outstanding Achievement: Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire by Helen Jin Kim,
Honorable Mention: Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State by Moon-Ho Jung
Honorable Mention: Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898-1946 by Tessa Winkelmann

Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Work

Outstanding Achievement: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia by Y-Dang Troeung
HONORABLE MENTION: Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 by Jeannie Shinozuka
Honorable Mention: Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries by Jodi Kim

Literary Studies

Outstanding Achievement: Minor Salvage by Stephen Hong Sohn
Honorable Mention: Pedagogies of Woundedness by James Kyung-jin Lee

Media, Performance, and Visual Studies

Outstanding Achievement: Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium by Mila Zuo
Honorable Mention: Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity by Takeo Rivera

Social Sciences

Outstanding Achievement: Contesting the Last Frontier: Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Political Representation of Asian Americans by Pei-Te Lien and Nicole Filler
Honorable Mention: The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program by Pallavi Banerjee

2024 Book Award Winners