2026 Eugen Weber Book Prize
The UCLA Department of History is pleased to announce that
Catherine Tatiana Dunlop
is the winner of the 2026 Weber Book Prize for her book The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024). A prize for the best book in modern French history (post-1815) published in the past two years, this award is named for the eminent French historian Eugen Weber (1925-2007) and brings a cash award of $15,000.
The Mistral is a chilly wind that blows from the north to the south through southern France and has historically been a mighty and uncontrollable force. Dunlop shows how it resisted efforts by the state to control it, and how it was embraced as a kind of patrimony by the Provençal people. Dunlop uses a rich panoply of sources and materials, ranging from archival documentation from Avignon, Arles, and Aix-en-Provence, to painting, literary sources, and scientific studies to craft an engagingly-written book that will not only interest scholars, but also the general public in terms of its implications for the future of the climate and climate change.
2026 Weber Book Prize winner Catherine Tatiana Dunlop with History Department Chair Kevin at the UCLA reception Friday evening (1/10/2026) at the American Historical Association.
Katie Hornstein was awarded Honorable Mention for her book Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2024).
