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)

2024 Book Award Winners

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

Read full citations for award winners and honorable mentions.