Margot Canaday’s brilliant book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America has won the 2012 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award.

“The Order of the Coif is an honorary scholastic society the purpose of which is to encourage excellence in legal education by fostering a spirit of careful study, recognizing those who as law students attained a high grade of scholarship, and honoring those who as lawyers, judges and teachers attained high distinction for their scholarly or professional accomplishments.”

This is Margot Canaday’s SEVENTH award for The Straight State. Some of the other accolades include the 2011 John Boswell Prize, the 2010 Cromwell Book Prize, the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, the Gladys M. Kammerer Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies.

In a press release posted online this week (http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/12-0117.shtml), SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), lauded Michael Nielsen’s work “for bringing Open Science into the mainstream,” and added him to a prestigious list of SPARC Innovators.

The timing for this announcement couldn’t be better as the ScienceOnline conference is set to get underway tomorrow and Michael was featured in a New York Times article by Thomas Lin yesterday.

SPARC cites Michael’s popularization of Open Science–in particular his hefty tour schedule of 2011 and his book Reinventing Discovery–in their announcement. They also have a wonderful profile with comments from SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph, Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Foundations, biochemist Cameron Neylon, and John Dupuis, the head of the Steacie Science and Engineering Library at York University (the blogger behind Confessions of a Science Librarian).

Princeton University Press is happy to join in with congratulations to Michael on this tremendous honor!

Congratulations to Lawrence P. Jackson, whose book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 is picking up accolades left and right. The book has won the 2011 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, which recognizes “an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture.”

“In this magisterial narrative history of African American literature running from the end of the Harlem Renaissance to the beginning of the civil rights period, Lawrence P. Jackson expands the archive for assessing African American writing during a period that has often been reduced to protest writing. Jackson places writers into fresh contexts of cohorts (critics and editors included) and threads a clear narrative line through three heady decades jam-packed with African American authors publishing in a variety of genres and venues. Jackson is excellent on the important influence of the Communist Party, on mid-twentieth-century black literary culture, and on issues of publishing and reception. Beautifully written and rich in historical detail, The Indignant Generation should quickly become a standard work in twentieth-century African American studies and United States publishing history.”

Jackson’s work is also a finalist for the 2011 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

“The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award™ is the first national award presented to published writers of African descent by the national community of Black writers. This award consists of prizes for the highest quality writing in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry.”

Emma Rothschild has won the 2011 Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year Award for her book The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History. This award recognizes an exceptional work of Scottish historical research:

“The Saltire Society Literary Awards bring together the very best of Scottish literature, from the writings of established and new authors through to the accomplishments of researchers and historians, and is a wonderful way of celebrating this important aspect of our rich cultural heritage.”

Elizabeth Popp Berman, author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine, has won the 2011 President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association. This award recognizes “an especially meritorious first work by a beginning scholar.”

Daniel Carpenter, who wrote Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA, has won the SSHA’s 2011 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award for “an outstanding book in social science history published in the previous year.”

Congratulations to both authors on their fantastic achievements!

Congratulations to Edwidge Danticat, author of Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, who has been honored with the 2011 Langston Hughes Medal from City College of New York. The award recognizes the body of Danticat’s work.

“The Langston Hughes Medal is awarded to highly distinguished writers from throughout the African American diaspora for their distinguished contributions to the arts and letters. Among past recipients of this award are James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Ralph W. Ellison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, August Wilson, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, and Octavia Butler, to name a few.”

Here is a video of a Q&A with the author at the 2011 Langston Hughes Festival:

Kristen Ghodsee’s “Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria” has won the 2011 John D. Bell Memorial Book Prize from the Bulgarian Studies Association. This award is established for the most outstanding recent scholarly book within any area of Bulgarian studies.

“Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion.

Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region’s state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women’s embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks’ new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria’s Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.”

This is the most recent in a slew of prizes for “Muslim Lives,” which has also won the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize, the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, and the 2010 Heldt Prize.

Congratulations to Amy Hungerford, whose book “Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960″ has been shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Textual Study of Religion.

We would also like to congratulate Mark Valeri, whose book “Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America” was shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion.

“In order to give recognition to new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion, the American Academy of Religion offers Awards for Excellence. These awards honor works of distinctive originality, intelligence, creativity and importance; books that affect decisively how religion is examined, understood, and interpreted.”

Check out the announcement of the 2011 winning books here.

“Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society” by PUP author Steven A. Barnes is the winner of the 2011 Baker-Burton Award: “The Award is given by the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association for the best first book in European history by a member of the Section or a [...]

Congratulations to Michael C. Horowitz, whose book The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics has won the 2011 Best Book prize in the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISS) competition. The ISSS Annual Best Book Award is awarded annually to a text “on any aspect of security [...]

Congratulations to Kristen Ghodsee, whose book Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria has been awarded the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Sciences. The prize is awarded annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for “an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.” Ghodsee’s book explores gender roles and reconfigurations in a post-Communist Bulgarian community.

Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe also won the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology and the 2010 Heldt Prize.