Jessica Schwartz, an associate professor of musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, has been awarded the Edie Turner First Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing for “Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences.”
The book, which was published in 2021, examines the 75 years of Marshallese music developed after the U.S. military detonated its most powerful nuclear bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Society for Humanistic Anthropology awards the prize to first books with writing that “deeply explores its subject and contributes in innovative and engaging ways to the genre(s) of ethnography and the field of humanistic (and/or post-humanistic) anthropology.
Schwartz’s research focuses on American studies, Pacific studies, environmental anthropology and Indigenous studies. She is also working on projects related to musical activism, artistic expression and climate change in the Pacific.
