The Department of English is delighted to congratulate Assistant Professor Corinne Mitsuye Sugino for receiving the Cultural Studies Association’s (CSA) First Book Prize  at the CSA’s annual conference last week for her book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers University Press, 2025). 

The CSA First Book Prize recognizes peer reviewed first books that demonstrate advancements and extensions in the field of cultural studies, as a method of inquiry and as an intellectual/political project. Awardees are given one year’s waived membership and registration fees to the CSA and a certificate at the Association's annual convention.

Making the Human offers the lens of racial allegory to consider how media, institutional, and cultural narratives mobilize difference to normalize a white, Western conception of the human. Rather than focusing on a singular arena of society, Sugino considers contemporary sources across media, law, and popular culture to understand how they interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, communication, and gender and sexuality studies, they argue that Asian American racialization and gendering plays a key role in shoring up abstract concepts such as ‘meritocracy,’ ‘family,’ ‘justice,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘nation’ in ways that naturalize hierarchy. In doing so, Making the Human grapples with anti-Asian racism’s entanglements with colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, and gendered violence. 

CSA President Dr. Robert F. Carley praised Making the Human for its “conjunctural-analytical work linking together and demonstrating the complex dynamics of the racialized and gendered boundaries that constitute the ‘genre’ of the human (wrought from a deep engagement with Sylvia Wynter’s work) through multiple figurations of Asian Americanness. Sugino’s larger project demonstrates a broad orientation to racialization that places Asian American studies in direct dialogue with Black studies scholarship through sites of allegory: media, law, popular culture, disease, and carcerality, offering means for unravelling categories and locating political possibilities going forward.”

“I am so honored and humbled to be awarded a CSA First Book Prize,” Sugino says. “My hope is that the book will be useful to scholars and students interested in rhetoric, Asian American studies, and/or cultural studies, and I am excited to continue my research in these areas!”

Congratulations to Professor Sugino for this exciting achievement!