UCHRI

In When Rebels Win (2025), Kai M. Thaler (UC Santa Barbara) explains why post-victory rebel groups govern in strikingly different ways. This book was supported in part by UCHRI’s Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop in 2021-22. To learn more about our Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant, please visit the link in our bio.

1. Image text: Title page reading “UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop 2021-22, Kai M. Thaler (UC Santa Barbara), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Thaler’s book, When Rebels Win.
2. Image text: “What determines how a rebel group will govern once in power? Does it retain characteristics from the civil war period once it moves from opposing the state to controlling it?”
3. Image text: “From the publisher: With rich evidence from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, When Rebels Win rethinks accounts of rebel behavior and post-war governance emphasizing factors such as resource availability or international intervention. Wartime rebel ideology, Thaler demonstrates, is not just ‘cheap talk’—and civil war can, counterintuitively, lead to stronger states.”

In First Contact (2025), Zac Zimmer (UC Santa Cruz) tends to science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality. This book was supported in part by UCHRI’s Faculty Manuscript Workshop in 2021-22. To learn more about our Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant, please visit the link in our bio.

1. Image text: Title page reading “UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop 2021-22, Zac Zimmer (UC Santa Cruz), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Zimmer’s book, First Contact.
2. Image text: “How can we come to recognize that the world between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans was a complete and independent world in itself before the period called the Conquest, with its own complexities, contradictions, and ontologies? How can we recognize this, while also reckoning with that world-altering event—the Conquest—­and the New World it brought into being?”
3. Image text: “At its heart, the speculative imagining of the conquest of the Americas is expressed in one short affirmation: it could have happened otherwise...What SF [science fiction] can teach its readers and audiences is how to use the tools of worldbuilding to truly imagine other worlds, conversant with other cosmovisions.”

In Concrete Encoded (2025), Nathaniel Wolfson (UC Berkeley) examines concrete art and poetry, its implications, and its influence in Brazil. This book was supported in part by UCHRI’s Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop in 2021-22. To learn more about our Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant, please visit the link in our bio.

1. Image text: Title page reading “UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop 2021-22, Nathaniel Wolfson (UC Berkeley), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Wolfson’s book, Concrete Encoded.
2. Image text: “Concrete Encoded takes up key moments from the 1940s to 1970s, during a period of rampant and accelerated technological industrialization in which digital tools and newly accessible computer technologies began to emerge and national culture in Brazil was reconfigured under the sign of the global.”
3. Image text: “The following chapters involve figures who, in distinct ways, related to—embraced, resisted, mythologized—a nascent digital era...I examine these phenomena against a background in which a dictatorship harnessed informatics to control and manage citizens, and artists challenged persisting messianic beliefs in technological progress in the tropics.”

In Bodies of Evidence (forthcoming 2026), Jaimie Morse (UC Santa Cruz) explores medical justice, global health, and sexual violence through practices and protocols surrounding the r**e kit. This book was supported in part by UCHRI’s Faculty Manuscript Workshop in 2024. To learn more about our Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant, please visit the link in our bio.

1. Image text: Title page reading “UCHRI Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant 2024, Jaimie Morse (UC Santa Cruz), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Morse’s book, Bodies of Evidence.
2. Image text: “From the publisher: Bodies of Evidence examines the r**e kit as an assemblage of practices and protocols at the nexus of law and medicine. Jaimie Morse traces how this assemblage was championed as a rights project in medicine, moving from the margins to the center of health care responses to sexual violence through new clinical standards of care, first in the United States and then in global humanitarian medicine.”
3. Image text: “From the publisher: The book chronicles a novel process of legal mobilization in medicine and interrogates the existential meanings and stakes of r**e kits, their associated practices, and their underlying assumptions and expectations for survivors of sexual violence.

In Boys Abducted (2025), Abdulhamit Arvas (University of Pennsylvania) tends to the history of abducted boys in English and Ottoman literary and visual culture to examine the relationships between ho******icism, race, and empire in the early modern period. This book was supported in part by a UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop grant in 2019-20. To learn more about our faculty manuscript workshop grants, please visit the link in our bio.

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1. Title page reading “UCHRI Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop Grant 2019-20, Abdulhamit Arvas (University of Pennsylvania), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Arvas’ book, Boys Abducted.
2. Image text: “The beautiful abducted boy, I argue, is a site for exploring the complex ho******ic subtexts of racial and religious difference and imperial violence in both the emergent empire of England and the far more vast and powerful Ottoman Empire.”
3. Image text: “The abducted boy offers a history of sexuality and race, where the racial and the q***r converge and conflict through the figure of the boy as he circulates in aesthetic, erotic, commercial, and imperial economies.”

In Waiting for the Cool Moon (2024), Wendy Matsumura (UC San Diego) provides an account of the post-World War I Japanese countryside, where people navigated enclosure, colonial relations, and imperialism. This book was supported in part by a UCHRI 2020-21 Mid-Career Faculty Manuscript Workshop grant. To learn more about our faculty manuscript workshop grants, please visit the link in our bio.

Image description:
1. Title page reading “UCHRI Mid-Career Faculty Manuscript Workshop 2020-21, Wendy Matsumura (UC San Diego), Manuscript Workshop Book Highlight.” Cover of Matsumura’s book, Waiting for the Cool Moon.
2. Image text: “Worlds are burning, but that, too, is becoming normalized…The inability to connect mass death and genocide over there with the modes of sociality and kinship that must be honored over ­here is a product of modes of rationalization and extraction that persist through the ongoing, relentless erasures of the knowledges, arts, and ways of life of ­those ­people deemed expendable in each site, though differently.”
3. Image text: “The stories I share­ here insisted on radically different relations that rejected their expulsion from village community but did not pin their ­political hopes or desires on state recognition.”

In “Beyond the Kitchen: B. Smith and the Legacy of Black Women’s Cultural Work,” Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon centers Black women as active participants of cultural production and consumption, moving beyond dominant media stereotypes.

This project was supported by the UCHRI Faculty Summer Research Grant. For more on this project, please visit the link in our bio for Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon’s “”In Memoriam”” article.

Image descriptions:
1. Image of B. Smith recipe book, Rituals and Celebrations, with title text “Beyond the Kitchen” and author name, Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon (UC Davis). The image is labelled with the UCHRI logo and the “Sustenance Spotlight” series.
2. Image text: Beyond the Kitchen critically examines the long legacy of Black women’s work in the culinary and hospitality arts, as illustrated by the 40-year career of Barbara Elaine Smith (b1950-d2020), a model, restaurateur, lifestyle television host, cookbook author, and all-around style maven.
3. Line drawing of a plate of spaghetti and a fork. Image text: Rather than a traditional biography, this book works to build a portrait of B. Smith’s public life as an influential Black woman in the food and lifestyle space from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.
4. Line drawing of cutlery. Image text: Although popular media culture labeled her the “Black Martha Stewart,” Barbara Elaine Smith built consciously and expansively on a legacy of Black women cultural workers.
5-6. Panoramic image of B. Smith paraphernalia including cookbooks, dishware, and magazines laid on top of floral fabric.
7. Image text: Her tag line, “Whatever you do, do it with style!” served as a way to elevate Black women’s connection to elegance, femininity, and beauty often denied us in mainstream U.S. culture.
8. Image text: Supported by UCHRI Faculty Summer Research Grant and link to UCHRI website.