Recent book awards for UC Davis faculty, all in the College of Letters and Science:

Seeta Chaganti, professor of English, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association of America, for Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages, exploring the complex relationship between medieval dance and medieval poetry. The Modern Language Association said: “Through her rich and historically grounded readings of medieval and modern works, Chaganti unearths an alternative phenomenology that transcends the confines of specific media and helps us understand varieties of sensory response beyond (and before) modernism’s stark regimentation of the senses.”

Howard Chiang, associate professor, Department of History, received the Humanities Book Prize from the International Convention of Asia Scholars, for After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China, about gender and sexuality in modern China; and the Dartmouth Medal from the American Library Association, for his work as editor-in-chief of the three-volume Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History, the first work of its kind to merge global history and LGBTQ history into one resource.

Jeffrey Kahn, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology, co-winner of the Avant Garde Book Prize from the Haitian Studies Association, for Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire, described by the award selection committee as a “timely and important contribution” to the field. The book, Kahn’s first, examines how boat migration from Haiti to the U.S. during the last three decades of the 20th century led to the development of new forms of legal activism, border governance and oceanic policing that have remade the spatiality of the American nation-state.

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, professor of art history, Der Mugrdechian Book Award from the Society for Armenian Studies, for The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, From Genocide to Justice. The volume reconstructs the journey of illustrated pages of the Zeytun Gospel from their creation in 1256 in present-day Turkey to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1994. Read more about the book on the L&S website.