Leeds Book Prize Winner 2025:

Bruce O’Neill (Anthropology, St. Louis University)

For the best book in urban anthropology published in the previous year, the 2025 CUAA Leeds Book Prize committee awards the Leeds prize to Bruce O’Neill (Anthropology, Saint Louis University), for his book entitled, Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. The Leeds Prize comes with a $500 award.

In Underground,  O’Neill provides an original and deeply innovative new approach to urban anthropology in a theoretically ambitious book that argues brilliantly that the pressures of an economically precarious existence for the middle class in Bucharest, Romania, are literally expressed vertically by their being driven “underground.”  O’Neill lays out in graphic spatial detail the forces of neoliberal markets and state policies that literally push members of the city’s middle class down under ground,  while they favor economic elites who own and live in economically valuable property above ground–often high above ground.

O’Neill shows that altitude matters in a lived and visceral sense of class.  Markets and policies discount, disrupt and displace the members of Bucharest’s middle class by pushing them below ground level into precarious existence in their housing, livelihoods, social and leisure time, mobility, health, emotional well-being, and even in their afterlives, as their graves are located far below the crypts of the economic elites who live, thrive and die high above ground.  The book is a tour de force of ethnographic imagination and careful methodology, allowing urban anthropologists to derive transposable new insights into their own ethnographic research about the residents of contemporary cities by re-envisioning the relationships between the vertically stratified spaces they live and work in, their class positions, and their life chances under the conditions of late neoliberalism.

Honorable Mentions in 2025 Leeds Book Prize Competition

There are also two books awarded Honorable Mentions in the 2025 Leeds Book Prize competition from among the books submitted to the competition.

CUAA awards an Honorable Mention for the Leeds Prize to Amy Zhang (Anthropology, New York University) for her book, Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2024).

In this wonderfully written book, Zhang explores the ways that China is confronting its domestic waste crisis. Since the 2000s, Chinese policymakers have remade cities with experiments in the circular economy; they have used technological and policy initiatives to convert waste into resources, a circular ecological loop, or so they hoped. Zhang traces ethnographically how this played out in the megacity of Guangzhou.  Zhang highlights the limits,