University of California Press Blog

View the UC Press 2026 Annual Report Increasingly, the value of UC Press publishing lies in its ability to engage critical issues with authority, depth, and credibility. From Our Executive Director I am honored to share our annual report for the 2025-26 fiscal year with you. The past twelve months have been a time of great turbulence in the world around us.

Lauren M. E. Goodlad What can literary and cultural criticism contribute to our understanding of generative AI? Quite a lot, argues Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and contributor to a new Representations special cluster on AI.

by Sheila Crane, Associate Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) For those of us whose lives follow the rhythms of the academic calendar, summer offers the opportunity for a different pace, no matter whether you are teaching summer classes, relaxing at the beach, or taking advantage of dedicated time for your own research.

Stay informed: Sign up for eNews About the Book A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How do you know the nature of another person: who she is, or what she is capable of?

by Sarah Brothers, author of Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival David and I met one morning at his new place. He was eager to show it off. After years in a tiny, light-less room in a downtown SRO, he had received Section 8 housing in a quiet, garden-filled neighborhood on the edge of San Francisco. A long, newly planted bed of succulents stretched from the sidewalk to his front door. I suspected he had planted them himself, and I was right.

by Jia-Lin Liu, author of Far from the Model Minority: Face, Class, and the Transnational Chinese Families Lily, from Far From the Model Minority I took this photograph during my fieldwork in Fuzhou, China, in 2019. This is Lily, one of the youngest participants in my book, Far from the Model Minority: Face, Class, and Transnational Chinese Families. Lily's future was being decided long before she had the chance to decide it for herself.

Matt Damon and family at the NYC Premiere of "The Odyssey." July 14, 2026. Photo credit: Philip Romano Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey has sparked renewed interest in one of the oldest and most influential stories ever told. If the film has inspired you to delve deeper into Homer's masterpiece, our journal, Classical Antiquity, offers a wealth of scholarship that reveals just how rich, surprising, and relevant the Odyssey remains.

What happens when we tell the story of the American Revolution from the Pacific rather than the Atlantic? That's the question at the heart of "American Revolutions in California," a new special issue of California History. Bringing together scholars of early California, Indigenous history, public history, and the history of race and citizenship, the issue reveals California not as a distant outpost but as a vital site for understanding the Revolution's long and complex legacies.

This interview was originally published by Public Seminar and is reposted here with permission. In her forthcoming book Reproductive Justice, Queerly (University of California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen, a feminist and queer studies scholar, looks at how language deployed in the name of queerness and reproductive justice can end up reinforcing the very structures it is meant to challenge.

Former Governor Doug Ducey’s Shipping Container Wall along the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Coronado National Forest, 2022; photo courtesy Tomas Jonsson. What does it mean to think about the U.S.–Mexico border not as a fixed line on a map but as an ongoing process?