Silvia Spitta, Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, is the recipient of the 2010 IHR Book Award for "Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas" (The University of Texas Press, 2009).

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of “slow violence” to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today.

Broglio posited, “We live on the same earth as animals but inhabit different worlds. How can we meet across the divide of worlds?” In his book he answers this question using phenomenology and contemporary art as tools to better understand the encounters that exist between our world and the world of animals. This exploration enhances our ability as humans to recognize animals as beings.

In the days before Google and the blogosphere, Americans still valued interaction with media and preserving historical events that mattered to them, despite their lack of virtual tools to deal with the nascent age of information. So with the tenacity and ingenuity so typical of 19th century American spirit, a new method of recording and interacting with media came to the fore: scrap booking. This woefully neglected trend in American popular culture touched the lives of everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, from emancipated slaves to confederate soldiers.

Throughout the ages, women have had to fight to maintain control of their sexuality and fertility, regardless of the specific era or culture. Whether it is the use of special herbs to reduce fertility or sea sponges serving as diaphragms, women have been incessantly innovative in their approach to fertility and pregnancy.

The IHR Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award is presented for a non-fiction work that exemplifies transdisciplinary, socially engaged humanities-based scholarship. This year’s award goes to Martijn Konings for his work "The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed." Konings, a political economist, moves beyond traditional Marxist critiques of capitalism by employing humanistic scholarship, drawing on the works of theorists such as Bruno Latour, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.

"Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change" by Charles T. Lee focuses on the daily experiences and actions of marginalized people such as migrant domestic workers, prostitutes and transgendered people as central in the rethinking of mainstream models of social change.

With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations.

"Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America's Postindustrial Frontier" reveals the contemporary story of Detroit’s rebirth as an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined access to work, home and upward mobility as race-neutral projects.