Associate Professor of History Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz is the winner of the 2008 American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award for his book Hotel: An American History, Yale University Press, 2007. The prize is awarded for the best first book in any field or period of history by a scholar living in the United States west of the Mississippi River or in the provinces of Canada west of Ontario.
Previous winners of the prize include Ramón Gutierrez, who received his bachelor’s from UNM, for When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, and Becky Nicolaides, University of California, San Diego, for My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965.