Book Award
The UAAC-AAUC Book Award is intended to recognize and celebrate the scholarly achievements of our members.
Monographs, edited anthologies, and exhibition catalogues published in English or French between January 1 and December 31 prior to the award year, are eligible. (For the 2026 award, books must have been published in 2025). Works published posthumously are ineligible.
Awards are presented each fall at the UAAC-AAUC annual conference.
Nominations must be submitted via our online form listing the nominator, title of the work, author, press, year, and nominee’s contact information. Authors or presses will be responsible for providing 3 copies (paper or digital) to the awards jury. Authors or presses will be responsible for providing 3 copies (paper or digital) to the awards jury.
Eligibility:
WHAT:
- Monographs, edited anthologies, and exhibition catalogues;
- published in English or French between January 1 and December 31 prior to the award year
WHEN: nominate by March 31st
WHO: UAAC Members in good standing can nominate other members or self-nominate
- open subject-matter, if the UAAC member is employed or studying at a Canadian institution;
- or any book on a Canadian topic (broadly conceived) if the UAAC member is not at a Canadian institution.
The 2025 Book Awards: Siobhan Angus and Elysia French & Amanda White
Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP, 2024)
Siobhan Angus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at Carleton University. Her research focuses on the history of photography and the environmental humanities with an emphasis on labor and environmental justice. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University, where her dissertation explored how photography documented and challenged the transformations of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism on the Canadian Shield. For this work, she was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Her work has appeared in Environmental Humanities, Transbordeur, and October, as well as in edited volumes including Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and Frederic Church: Global Artist (Yale University Press, 2026). Her book Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024) received the 2024 Photography Network Book Prize and the 2025 UAAC-AAUC Book Prize, and was a finalist for the College Art Association’s 2025 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She is also the recipient of the 2025 Faculty of Public and Global Affairs Research Excellence Award.
Elysia French and Amanda White, Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada (Wilfred Laurier Press, 2024)
Elysia French (she/her), a white settler scholar, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Brock University. French is trained as an art historian and studies the intersections of contemporary art and the environment, with an interest in the visual culture of oil, climate change, and multispecies relationships.
Amanda White (she/her) is Canada Research Chair in Sustainability, Ecological Justice, and Climate action in Creative Practices (Tier 2) at Emily Carr University. Her current artistic practice and research includes studio-based work as well as curatorial and publication projects with a focus on plants, food justice, and environmentally engaged arts. Recent collaborative projects include The Creative Food Research Collaboratory, a SSHRC funded project at the intersection of art and food studies; The co-edited collection, Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2024, which has expanded into a podcast series; and a middle-grade graphic novel about food security forthcoming from Second Story Press in 2026.
| Year | Recipients | |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | ||
| 2025 | -Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography. Siobhan Angus, Duke UP -Ecologies in Practice: Environmentally Engaged Arts in Canada. Edited by Elysia French and Amanda White; Wilfrid Laurier University Press | |
| 2024 | -Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms, and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000. Edited by Michele Hardy, Timothy Long, and Julia Krueger -Variable Conditions. Para-computational Arts in Canada, 1965–1995. Edited by Adam Lauder, McGill-Queen’s University Press | |
| 2023 | Feltness: Research-Creation, Socially Engaged Art, and Affective Pedagogies. Stephanie Springgay, Duke UP | |
| 2023 | Made for the Eye of One Who Sees: Canadian Contributions to the Study of Islamic Art and Archaeology. Marcus Milwright and Evanthia Baboula, eds. McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Royal Ontario Museum. | |
| 2023 | Revisiting Montreal Abstraction of the 1940s. Esther Trépanier, Scott, Brandtner, Eveleigh, Webber. Translated by Judith Terry. McGill-Queen’s University Press. |