Award Winning Titles

Indiana University Press is proud that our books have received over 60 awards (and counting!) during the 2020-2021 calendar year. Many congratulations to our well-deserving authors!

Award-Winning Books

Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa

Winner: ALA Book of the Year: Scholarship

Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa

Ketu H. Katrak

Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers the first full-length monograph on the award-winning choreographer, theater director, curator, and creative artist in contemporary global performance. Working within the contexts of African studies, dance, theater, and performance, Ketu H. Katrak explores the extent of Pather's productive career but also places him and his work in the South African and global arts scene, where he is considered a visionary.

Pather, a South African of Indian heritage, is known as a master of space, site, and location. Katrak examines how Pather's performance practices place him in the center of global trends that are interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and multimedia and that cross borders between dance, theater, visual art, and technology.

Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers a vision of an artist who is strategically aware of the spatiality of human life, who understands the human body as the nation's collective history, and who is a symbol of hope and resilience after the trauma of violent segregation.

Casting a Giant Shadow

Winner: Janovics Center Best Book

Casting a Giant Shadow

The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema

Rachel S. Harris, Dan Chyutin, Zachary Ingle, Ohad Landesman, Shmulik Duvdevani, Neta Alexander, Joshua Beaty, Nava Dushi, Yael Munk, Yaron Peleg, Ariel M. Sheetrit, Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Pablo Utin, Raz Yosef, Boaz Hagin, Mary N. Layoun, Julie Grimmeisen, Yaron Shemer, Anat Dan

Film came to the territory that eventually became Israel not long after the medium was born. Casting a Giant Shadow is a collection of articles that embraces the notion of transnationalism to consider the limits of what is "Israeli" within Israeli cinema.

As the State of Israel developed, so did its film industries. Moving beyond the early films of the Yishuv, which focused on the creation of national identity, the industry and its transnational ties became more important as filmmakers and film stars migrated out and foreign films, filmmakers, and actors came to Israel to take advantage of high-quality production values and talent. This volume, edited by Rachel Harris and Dan Chyutin, uses the idea of transnationalism to challenge the concept of a singular definition of Israeli cinema.

Casting a Giant Shadow offers a new understanding of how cinema has operated artistically and structurally in terms of funding, distribution, and reception. The result is a thorough investigation of the complex structure of the transnational and its impact on national specificity when considered on the global stage.

Atomic Tunes

Commended: Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research

Atomic Tunes

The Cold War in American and British Popular Music

Tim Smolko, Joanna Smolko

What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war?

During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions.

Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.

Reclaiming Popular Documentary

Winner: Ray and Pat Browne Culture Award - Bests Critically Edited Volume

Reclaiming Popular Documentary

Christie Milliken, Steve F. Anderson, Ezra Winton, Patricia Aufderheide, Zoë Druick, Devon Coutts, Sabiha Ahmad Khan, Anthony Kinik, Michael Brendan Baker, Allison de Fren, Jonathan Kahana, Shilyh Warren, S. Topiary Landberg, Landon Palmer, Dylan Nelson, Alexandra Juhasz, Rick Prelinger, George S. Larke-Walsh

The documentary has achieved rising popularity over the past two decades thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this, documentary studies still tends to favor works that appeal primarily to specialists and scholars.

Reclaiming Popular Documentary reverses this long-standing tendency by showing that documentaries can be—and are—made for mainstream or commercial audiences. Editors Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson, who consider popular documentary to be a subfield of documentary studies, embrace an expanded definition of popular to acknowledge the many evolving forms of documentary, such as branded entertainment, fictional hybrids, and works with audience participation. Together, these essays address emerging documentary forms—including web-docs, virtual reality, immersive journalism, viral media, interactive docs, and video-on-demand—and offer the critical tools viewers need to analyze contemporary documentaries and consider how they are persuaded by and represented in documentary media.

By combining perspectives of scholars and makers, Reclaiming Popular Documentary brings new understandings and international perspectives to familiar texts using critical models that will engage media scholars and fans alike.

Thomas Sankara

Winner: Outstanding Academic Title

Thomas Sankara

A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa

Brian J. Peterson

Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa offers the first complete biography in English of the dynamic revolutionary leader from Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. Coming to power in 1983, Sankara set his sights on combating social injustice, poverty, and corruption in his country, fighting for women's rights, direct forms of democracy, economic sovereignty, and environmental justice.

Drawing on government archival sources and over a hundred interviews with Sankara's family members, friends, and closest revolutionary colleagues, Brian J. Peterson details Sankara's political career and rise to power, as well as his assassination at age 37 in 1987, in a plot led by his close friend Blaise Compaoré.

Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa offers a unique, critical appraisal of Sankara and explores why he generated such enthusiasm and hope in Burkina Faso and beyond, why he was such a polarizing figure, how his rivals seized power from him, and why T-shirts sporting his image still appear on the streets today.