Celebrating 2025 Award Winners from the University of Michigan Press

By: Sarah Berg | Date: December 11, 2025 | Tags: award, University of Michigan Press Book Award, Tobin Siebers Prize

Over the past year, the University of Michigan Press has published nearly 100 titles across the social sciences and humanities disciplines. From Asian Studies, to Theater and Performance, to Disability Studies, to Political Science, and more, these books exemplify our dedication to helping students, researchers, and creators to succeed through our publishing and distribution programs. As 2025 comes to a close, we are excited to celebrate so many award winners.

Recognition for the Press

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recognizes outstanding open access books and publishers through the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards. Two University of Michigan Press books were named finalists in the Multimodal category: Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema by Abé Markus Nornes and Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves by Jacob Smith. Brushed in Light examines how the brushed word appears in films and in the film cultures of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China cinemas. Lightning Birds is a multi-media project that consists of a five-episode audiobook and curatorial essay to tell the story of radio, bird migration, and ecocriticism. Read more about the finalists and the award here.

Every year, the Historical Society of Michigan acknowledges individuals and organizations who have made outstanding contributions to the appreciation, collection, preservation, and promotion of state and local history. Concrete Century: Julius Kahn and the Construction Revolution by Michael G. Smith received the 2025 Michigan State History Award from the Historical Society of Michigan. Concrete Century also received an Honorable Mention from the 2024 Foreword INDIES Awards in the Biography category.

Photo of Rashmi Luthra and Sales Manager Scott Ham at the Faculty Awards. Courtesy Rashmi Luthra.

Through the annual University of Michigan Press Book Award, we recognize a member of the University Michigan faculty whose book, published by UMP, has added the greatest distinction to the Press list. Rashmi Luthra was presented the 2025 University of Michigan Press Book Award for her book Destination Detroit: Discourses on the Refugee in a Post-Industrial City. Read more about the book and prize here.

In tribute to the late Tobin Siebers, UMP and the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature established the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. The prize is presented to a book-length manuscript that offers exceptional contributions to the field of disability studies. The 2024 winner was awarded to Affecting Disability on American Screens by Angela Marie Smith. Read more about the book and prize here.

Award-Winning Open Access Titles

Opening access to our innovative scholarship is a key part of the Press’s commitment to knowledge integrity, human dignity, and digital innovation and more and more of our OA titles are recognized by award committees every year for their vital contributions.

With the help of the TOME (Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem) initiative and the generous support of UC Davis, Jon D. Rossini’s Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama was made freely available to readers. This open access title explores drama’s powerful capacity to model nuanced political action. It was awarded an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association’s Prize in U.S. Latino and Latina and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. The book was also a finalist for the 2025 Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s 2025 Outstanding Book Award and the 2024 American Theatre and Drama Society’s John W. Frick Book Award.

Another open access title, Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China by Tarryn Li-Min Chun won the 2025 Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s 2025 Outstanding Book Award in Innovative Achievement and was a co-winner of the 2024 Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Memorial Award. Tarryn’s book was also a finalist for the 2025 American Society for Theatre Research Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History.

Theater, Performance, and Music

Many of our theater, performance, and music studies titles have been recognized for their outstanding scholarship in the past year:

The Bastard Instrument: A Cultural History of the Electric Bass by Brian F. Wright received the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Performing Arts & Music and the 2025 ARSC Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research on Record Labels or General Recording Topics.
Méliès Boots: Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris by Matthew Solomon received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award.
Fantasies of Ito Michio by Tara Rodman received the 2025 Dance Studies Association’s Oscar Brockett Book Prize.
Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity by Natalie Zervou won the 2025 Dance Studies Association’s de la Torre Bueno Book Prize.
Incarceration Games: A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons, and Performance by Stephen J. Scott-Bottoms was a finalist for the American Society for Theatre Research’s Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History.
On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone by Philip Ewell won the Society for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award.
Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinship by Naomi Macalalad Bragin won the 2025 American Society for Theatre Research’s Errol Hill Award.
Drew Nobile’s essay “Sondheim’s Dissonant Tonality” from Here for the Hearing edited by Michael Buchler and Gregory J. Decker received an honorable mention for the 2025 Kurt Weill Book Prize.