Columbia University Press

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

This week, Beacon Broadside celebrated the start of Poetry Month with a collection of videos of poets reading their poems! Mary Oliver, Sonia Sanchez, Craig Teicher, C.D. Wright, Kevin Young, and Dobby Gibson all make appearances. (Poetry lovers: stay tuned for our poetry feature here at the CUP blog next week!)

There are many reasons for scholars to write for an academic audience rather than a popular one, particularly when the topic is a controversial one. At the JHU Press Blog, Mark A. Largent explains why he decided to write a book for a popular audience on vaccinations, despite all of the disincentives. Writing for a popular audience is a “duty” for scholars, Largent claims: “we ought to find ways to do extension work that applies our expertise to broader public problems and appeals to broader audiences.”

This week From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, ran a post about a unique approach the press took to publishing their new book, Two Presidents are Better Than One. In order to draw more attention to the books unique argument (that a bipartisan executive branch might be the best way to break our cycle of political gridlock), the design team for the book decided to print two versions of the book’s cover, one with a Republican elephant, one with a Democrat donkey.

April 4th was the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and at the UNC Press Blog, Gordon K. Mantler has a guest post arguing that, while everyone remembers (and should remember) King’s work for racial justice, we would be well served to remember his other major march in Washington D.C.: the Poor People’s Campaign.

“[T]he U.S. housing crisis that began in 2008 is not behind us.” At the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Dianne Harris argues that not only is the housing crisis very much alive, but that we shouldn’t forget that, for many, housing difficulties have their roots in the racially troubled past of the US: “housing segregation, the seeming ineffability of white privilege and its connections to home ownership, and the cultural work performed by representations of houses and housing issues” all come into play.

Are challenging projects that ask students to “make arguments backed by evidence, to analyze the arguments of their peers, to communicate what they learned to experts, and to work together” more effective than standardized, knowledge-based tests in preparing students for college? At Voices in Education, the blog of Harvard Education Publishing, Robert Rothman claims that these types of assignments, part of what he calls “deeper learning” should be a major part of US education in the future.

On a similar note, at An Akronism, the blog of the University of Akron Press, Thomas Bacher discusses the role that MOOCs and online learning more generally should play in the process of higher education. Bacher believes that online pedagogy has an important role to play, but also believes that face-to-face interaction is crucial. Finding a useful balance between the two will be a crucial part of the development of education in the near future.

Edward Luttwak’s concept of “great state autism” refers to “a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity.” This week, the Harvard University Press Blog has a post explaining Luttwak’s ideas and how they relate to major world powers, Russia, China, India, and the US, and expanding the idea through the work of Diana Pinto to a much smaller country in land area and population: Israel.

The case of Jack the Ripper, the famous serial killer from late 19th century London, has inspired a whole discipline: “ripperology.” At the OUPblog, Paul J. Ennis has a post explaining the attractions of studying the case of Jack the Ripper and delving into the specific case of Emma Smith’s murder.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a March Madness post from the University of Michigan Press blog. The Michigan basketball team is getting set to play in the Final Four this weekend, and in a guest post, Mike Rosenbaum details the rise of this specific version of the Michigan team, starting in 2009 and running up to the team’s present-day success.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

Chinua Achebe passed away last week, and at the OUPblog, Richard Dowden has written a post in memory of Achebe, looking back at Achebe’s life and works, discussing his massive and continuing influence, and telling the story of Dowden’s own interactions with the great author. “A conversation with Chinua Achebe was a deep, slow and gracious matter. He was exceedingly courteous and always listened and reflected before answering. In his later years he talked even more slowly and softly, savouring the paradoxes of life and history. He spoke in long, clear, simple sentences which often ended in a profound and sad paradox. Then those extraordinary eyes twinkled, his usually very solemn face would break into a huge smile and he would chuckle.”

The NYU Press blog, From the Square, continued their month-long focus on Women’s History Month this week with a post by Melissa R. Klapper examining why we are still apparently “disconcerted by women in positions of authority.” In her post, Klapper delves into at the history of women working in her attempt to come up with an answer.

March Madness is in full swing, and at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press, Gregory Kaliss takes a break from this year’s action to look back at an infamous NCAA tournament regional final weekend in Dallas in 1957. The Kansas University Jayhawks rolled to two convincing victories to advance to the Final Four, that weekend, but because the team was integrated (and in fact featured Wilt Chamberlain, one of the greatest basketball players of all time), they faced discrimination and racial violence both on and off the court.

What exactly is “craft” and how is it different (if it differs at all) from art? At the UNC Press Blog, Howard Risatti digs into these and other thorny questions in a guest post. Along the way, he also discusses how crafts and art can raise our awareness of ecological issues.

“Julius Caesar shows us two different kinds of political love, in tragic opposition. Brutus is principled, but he is not cold. He loves the institutions of the Roman Republic, and he tells us that this abstract love has driven out his personal love of Caesar, as fire drives out fire…. Brutus’s antitype is Antony, who can understand no kind of love other than the personal, who cannot refrain from calling the dead man “Julius” even in the presence of the conspirators.” This week, The Chicago Blog has a fascinating excerpt from Martha Nussbaum’s Shakespeare and the Law.

Since late 2008, North Dakota has been experiencing an “economic boom and rapid population growth” as the result of the discovery of oil and natural gas underneath the state. At the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Dean Hulse warns that, while the boom has brought some good, it’s important to pay attention to the possible long-term consequences of the new uses of the land in the state.

At the JHU Press Blog this week, Valerie Weaver-Zercher discusses her decision to present her academic research in “what literary theorist Scott Slovic calls ‘narrative scholarship,’ in which writers do not strive to absent themselves from the text.” In her post, Weaver-Zercher looks at the positives and negatives of attempting to write objectively and of acknowledging the subjectivity of one’s perspective in an academic work.

In an interview with Beacon Broadside, Kim E. Nielsen thinks about the similarities and differences in approaching history through different lenses, in particular, through the lenses of women’s history and disability history. While there are clear differences, particularly in the “slipperiness” over time in the definitions of “woman” and “disabled,” she notes a number of important similarities, as well, in particular that “women, children, enslaved people, and people with disabilities have tended to share a similar legal status, having a limited legal identity and having their legal ability to act covered by somebody else.

The fate of Florida’s famed springs is an ongoing concern for the state, which recently announced that it will reclaim Silver Springs in an “attempt to prevent further environmental degradation of the natural wonder.” At the Florida Bookshelf, the blog of the University Press of Florida, Gary Monroe discusses this move by the state and looks at the historical importance of Florida’s springs.

The popular version of the history of tanning is a relatively simple one, involving the evolution of paleness being a sign of wealth to the Industrial Revolution’s reversal of this idea, with Coco Chanel playing a crucial role somewhere along the line. At the Penn Press Log, however, Catherine Cocks argues that this version simply isn’t true, and, more worryingly, ignores the important role that race played in establishing norms of skin color.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!

This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a guest post from Professor Katerina Kolozova, in which she discusses what she sees as the state of The Real today and outlines some ideas in her forthcoming book Cut of the Real, to be published by Columbia University Press in the Fall:

What Baudrillard called the perfect crime has become the malaise of the global(ized) intellectual of the beginning of the 21’st century. The “perfect crime” in question is the murder of the real, carried out in such way as to create the conviction it never existed and that the traces of its erased existence were mere symptom of its implacable originary absence. The era of postmodernism has been one of oversaturation with signification as a reality in its own right and also as the only possible reality. In 1995, with the publication of The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard declared full realization of the danger he warned against as early as in 1976 in his book The Symbolic Exchange and Death. The latter book centered on the plea to affirm reality in its form of negativity, i.e., as death and the trauma of interrupted life. And he did not write of some static idea of the “Negative,” of “the constitutive lack” or “absence” as conceived by postmodernism and epistemological poststructuralism. The fact that, within the poststructuralist theoretical tradition, the real has been treated as the “inaccessible” and “the unthinkable” has caused “freezing” of the category (of the real) as immutable, univocal and bracketed out of discursiveness as an unspoken axiom.

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This week we are featuring the Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture series, edited by Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey Robbins, and Slavoj Zizek. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win FREE copies of The Incident at Antioch by Alain Badiou, Rage and Time by Peter Sloterdijk, and Hermeneutic Communism by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Also check out Insurrections on Pinterest!

Today, we have a guest post from Professor Clayton Crockett, in which he discusses how the series began, and where it may be going in the future.

1. In the Beginning

The idea for a book series that became Insurrections began in Philadelphia in December 2005 at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Creston Davis was telling me that a Christian publisher approached him about editing a book series with Slavoj Žižek, and he asked if I was interested in participating in such a series. I told him that I was currently working with Jeff Robbins on a series for a small publisher in Colorado, so what if we both came on board? Creston set up a breakfast with Jeff and I and Slavoj to talk about this possibility. We quickly realized that any book series we could co-edit would exceed traditional theological boundaries, and so we brainstormed about potential publishers. Jeff had just submitted a book he was editing to Columbia University Press, on the recommendation of Santiago Zabala. This book, published as After the Death of God, featured John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, and it became the first book in the series. We contacted Wendy Lochner and she encouraged us, asking to see a proposal. This series proposal was approved in summer 2006 at the same editorial board meeting that approved the book manuscript After the Death of God. Even though having four co-editors seemed a bit unconventional and perhaps even unwieldy, in practice it has worked incredibly well because we all trust each other, and have a great working relationship with Wendy and Christine Dunbar (and previously Christine Mortlock).

2. A Body of Work

As of this writing, we have published 16 titles in the series, and we are extremely proud of all of our books, not only in themselves but in terms of the kinds of interconnections they make and the kinds of energies they unleash together. We seem to have a friendly rivalry with Amy Allen’s great series “New Directions in Critical Theory,” that started around the same time and has published about the same number of titles. We share some overlapping theoretical interests but of course Insurrections is more explicitly focused on issues and questions of religion. We have published works by and featuring major European philosophers, including Slavoj Žižek, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, and Peter Sloterdijk. We have published major American philosophers of religion such as John D. Caputo and Richard Kearney, and we have published religious theorists engaging important postcolonial themes like Arvind Mandair and Ananda Abeysekara. It’s about creating an intersection around religion as a void or an empty space where themes of Continental philosophy, political theology and critical theory converge and amplify each other, opening up new ways of thinking about religion and politics understood in broad terms. Later this spring, we have three more books appearing in the series: a translation of Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt, with an introduction by New Zealand scholar of religion Mike Grimshaw; a translation of another book by Peter Sloterdijk, Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, with an introduction by Creston Davis; and a book co-authored by Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston on Self and Emotional Life. Finally, we have books forthcoming by Ward Blanton, Katerina Kolozova and Tyler Roberts, as well as translations of books by Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and François Laruelle.

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Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

Today, March 22, is World Water Day, and in honor of the occasion, the MIT Press blog has a post from Joanna Robinson on water cooperation. In her post, Robinson argues that, while “[w]ater has increasingly become a source of conflict globally,” “because water is a shared resource and a source of life, it has the potential to unite individuals and societies through increased cooperation over water governance as well as a commitment to equity and sustainability.”

From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, continued their celebration and examination of Women’s History Month with a post by Leela Fernandes in which she asks us to consider how we gain our impressions of women from around the world. Thinking about the origins of what we know about the world, she argues, “allows us to grapple with the challenges of “knowing” the world in ways that are ethical.”

What is “the brain supremacy”? In an interview with the OUPblog, Kathleen Taylor explains the “increasing relevance of neuroscience” and tries to imagine where brain research will take us in the future. “At present, we know of no such limitation. We also know that ideas which, two decades ago, would have been derided as impossible are now being calmly considered in the research literature.”

Feel underpaid? At the AMACOM Books Blog, Shoya Zichy argues that being underpaid is often the result of an under-assertive employee rather than an uncaring boss. In her post, she provides a step-by-step approach to negotiating a better compensation package at work.

“On any given day, more than 81,000 youth are confined to residential facilities in the juvenile justice system.” At Voices in Education, the blog of Harvard Education Publishing, Joanne Karger asks how best we can provide the education that will help reintegrate these youths into society. In her post, Karger claims that Universal Design for Learning (UDL) “has the potential to bring about fundamental improvements in the education provided to incarcerated youth.”

In a thoughtful post at the Yale Press Log, Fania Oz-Salzberger discusses two themes that she and her father address in their recent book: “How did the Jews remain Jews? and, How can books keep families and generations together?”

A video on the level of wealth inequality in the US recently went viral on Youtube, racking up over five million views to date. At the Stanford University Press Blog, Angelique Haugerud discusses why the video’s reception matters, and how it links the twenty-first century back with “earlier wealth bubbles–such as the late-nineteenth-century era Mark Twain popularized as a Gilded Age of surface glitter and vast underlying corruption, when the very rich sparkled while many went hungry.”

At Beacon Broadside, sociologist Laurie Essig denounces the practice of politically motivated “bad sociology.” In particular, she takes aim at a recent study by sociologist Mark Regnerus designed to measure the happiness of children of gay parents. She claims that Regnerus and the funders of his study “were assuming that the results would show gay families are worse than straight families.”

The Pan American Union on the National Mall in Washington D.C. became the home of an ambitious program of visual arts in the Cold War period. At the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Claire F. Fox takes a look at the the history of the PAU, and contemplates the role of art in forging positive international relations between nations.

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Welcome to this special Ides of March edition of our weekly University Press Roundup. We’ve collected the best posts of the week from the blogs of academic publishers. As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

March 14 (3-14) is widely known as Pi Day. Several publishers ran posts this week in honor of the occasion. The MIT Press blog has a mathematics-centric interview with Sanjoy Mahajan on how the proliferation of technology has affected how we teach and learn math. Meanwhile, the University Press of Kentucky blog and the Penn Press Log took a very different approach to Pi(e) Day: the Kentucky Press blog provides a delicious recipe for a “Kentucky Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie,” while the Penn Press Log provides a delicious recipe for Pennsylvania Dutch shoofly pie. Bring on the pie!

What, exactly, is the role that scholarly publishers play in the creation of scholarship? And more importantly, what is the role that scholarly publishers SHOULD play in the creation of scholarship? These are the questions that University of Minnesota Press senior acquisitions editor Jason Weidemann asks in “What do university presses do?,” a post at the University of Minnesota Press Blog. Weidemann takes issue with “rhetoric about scholarly publishers these days, rhetoric which paints us as parasites sucking profit and capital out of the work of scholars, structured around a ‘conflict’ between publishers, libraries, and scholars often oversimplified into a binary,” and uses the journey of a new UMP book by Matthew Wolf-Meyer to argue against this oversimplification.

“Commas are extremely useful but, to my mind, they are the most singularly misunderstood punctuation mark.” At the JHU Press Blog, manuscript editor Michele Callaghan has a post delving into the many uses (and far too frequent misuses) of the comma. She focuses particular attention on the way people often want to add a comma before conjunctions, “possibly from a misguided sense of drama.”

In the latest entry in their “Director Dish” series of posts, the University of Nebraska Press Blog has a discussion of how book titling works differently in different book genres. The discussion brings up an age-old debate that’s recently been given additional fuel by the rise of search engine optimization as an important consideration in titling (particularly nonfiction) books: is it better to have a descriptive title or a flashy creative title? And what role should the subtitle play?

MOOCs have (once again) been a contentious topic of numerous op-eds recently, largely spurred by an article in the NYTimes by Thomas Friedman. An Akronism, the University of Akron Press blog, dove into the fray this week with a post looking at MOOCs and the phenomenon of MOOCH (MOOC Hysteria).

On March 26, the US Supreme Court will for the first time address the legality of bans on same sex marriage by hearing Hollingsworth v. Perry, a case based on California’s recent state ban on gay marriage. At This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, six experts debate the coming case and what the 14th Amendment actually means.

The generation born between 2000 and 2020 is likely to be significantly smaller than the Millennial Generation now entering the work force. At the AMACOM Books Blog, Claire Raines has a guest post offering a quick overview of recent generational history and ten quick predictions for this new generation, which she’s dubbed Generation Z for the purposes of the post. Interestingly enough, she argues that, “In just the way Gen Xers felt they grew up in the shadow of the Baby Boom, Z’s will feel like they’re coming of age in the shadow of Millennials.”

A book can be one of the most powerful gifts. At the LSU Press Blog, author Michael Downs tells the story of a gifted book that helped clarify what “writing fiction” actually meant to him. As he succinctly puts it: “My writing career started with the gift of a book.”

Hugo Chávez passed away earlier this week, and while the former leader of Venezuela has something of a bad reputation here in the US media, at From the Square, the NYU Press blog, Michael D. Yates argues that Chávez “was a great champion of the impoverished workers and peasants of both Venezuela and the world.”

At the OUPblog, Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos have a fascinating guest post looking at female responses to Homer. They argue that “[i]n the last twenty years there has been an extraordinarily vital and widespread response to Homer by women writers,” and they cite a wide variety of works from Laura Esquival’s Like Water for Chocolate (published in 1989) to last year’s The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller, as evidence.

Finally, The University of Georgia Press blog has been continuing their “30 Days of the Flannery O’Connor Award” series this week. All the posts in this series are well worth reading, but Tony Ardizzone’s examination of Salvatore La Puma’s The Boys of Bensonhurst is particularly engaging.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

We’ll start out this week with a couple of excellent posts this week considering the history and role of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day (March 8). At the Stanford University Press Blog, Myra Marx Ferree has a guest post looking at the roots of International Women’s Day. And at From the Square, the NYU Press blog, Alison Piepmeier explains why she’s “a bit skeptical” of Women’s History Month.’

It’s now been over a month since US Secretary of State for Defense Leon Panetta announced that in 2016, combat roles in the US military would be open to female service personnel. At the OUPblog, Anthony King looks at the question that has been raised by critics of the decision to open combat roles to women: Can women fight? Using examples from the Canadian Army and the UK, he argues that “[i]t is empirically false to claim that women cannot serve on the frontline or that they necessarily undermine cohesion.”

Throughout the month of March, the University of Georgia Press blog will be hosting “30 Days of the Flannery O’Connor Award,” a series of guest posts from winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The first of these posts, by Jessica Treadway, discusses Hester Kaplan’s The Edge of Marriage.

Meanwhile, the JHU Press Blog is running a series of posts called “Kill Your Darlings,” in which authors are asked “What poem, line, stanza, or piece of brilliant work have you sacrificed for the greater good?” So far, X. J. Kennedy and Peter Filkins have written very interesting posts attempting to answer that question.

Michael Sadowski made a couple of appearances in the blogs of academic presses this week. First, at Voices in Education, the blog of Harvard Education Publishing, Sadowski discusses the powerful role parents can play in setting goals for students. Then, at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press, Sadowski delves into the experiences that went into his new book, In a Queer Voice.

This week, Beacon Broadside, the blog of Beacon Press, has a Q&A with David Chura, author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine. Over the course of the interview Chura explains what inspired him to write about incarcerated youth, why he decide to ask other teachers to tell stories from their careers, and how he and other teachers find the strength to deal with the additional challenges involved in teaching at-risk kids.

In honor of their centennial year, the Harvard University Press Blog is running a series of posts on 100 significant HUP titles. This week, Executive Editor-at-large Elizabeth Knoll looks back at Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education, originally published in 1960. In her post, Knoll discusses how spectacular best-sellers from academic publishers often come from unexpected sources, and how, “in 1960, no one expected the report of a Woods Hole conference of eminent scientists and psychologists, spurred by the political shock of Sputnik to imagine reforms in American schools, to fascinate and inspire book reviewers, university students, neighborhood book groups, and school teachers for decades.”

While a majority of the time and effort spent on editing a book focuses on what goes between the covers (and rightfully so), at the University of Nebraska Press blog, UNP marketing manager Martyn Beeny argues that the value of the marketing copy written about the book should not be underrated: “Writing copy for a catalog or the back cover of a book is not to be confused with writing the book in the first place or editing it into shape in the second, but it is an authorial and editorial challenge in its own right.”

This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, has recently been posting a series of fascinating essays on paternalism. This week, Sarah Conley has a guest post arguing that, while paternalism has a bad name, “[m]uch of our traditional dislike of paternalism is based on a false picture of human nature.” She asks why we accept so readily paternalistic interventions in a few cases (like being required by law to wear a seatbelt) and not in others with similar effects.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up for this week’s Roundup with a Q&A with Patrick McGilligan at the University of Minnesota Press Blog about the Hollywood Blacklist of 1947. In a story that is often forgotten today, 36 members of the Hollywood community were blacklisted due to their alleged involvement with the Communist Party.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

Happy March! March is Women’s History Month, and at From the Square, the NYU Press blog, Margaret S. Williams has a post wondering “how the dearth of women in public life will affect the celebration of this month in the future.” She worries that if “there are no women willing to take the risk and aim for more power and prestige, we lose not only examples for future generations, but we may also lose any reason to celebrate this month.”

The word “paternalism” is used in a variety of contexts with a variety of meanings. At This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, six contributors to the new book Paternalism: Theory and Practice discuss paternalism, explaining what it is, how morally problematic it is, and the differences between types of paternalism.

This week there were a couple of excellent posts on immigration. First, at the UNC Press Blog, Gordon K. Mantler discusses the relative importance of the issue of immigration in earning votes from the Latino population in the US, and reminds politicians that immigration is NOT the only issue about which Latinos in the US care. Meanwhile, at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press, Carol Kelly explains how immigrants in a new country are able to find a sense of “home” in their new and unfamiliar surroundings.
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Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

We’ll get things started this week with an in-depth look at North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and capabilities, courtesy of Joseph M. Siracusa at the OUPblog. Siracusa asks, “what, then, is Pyongyang’s motivation for its nuclear and missile programs? Is it, as Victor Cha once asked, for swords, shields, or badges? In other words, are the programs intended to provide offensive weapons, defensive weapons, or symbols of status?”

President Obama recently gave the first State of the Union Address of his second term in office, and at the Chicago Blog, the blog of the University of Chicago Press, Sandra M. Gustafson takes a close look at this most recent SotUA. She pays particular attention to how this speech mirrors and differs from other recent Obama speeches, from his second inaugural address to his campaign speeches.

The JHU Press Blog continued their ongoing look at firearms in America this week with a guest post from Lawrence Rosenthal in which he looks at the constitutional passages pertaining to gun rights in America. Obviously the Second Amendment takes pride of place in his discussion, but he argues that we should take seriously the preamble as well, as it “represents a textual commitment to regulation found nowhere else in the Bill of Rights.”

Barack Obama’s path to the Presidency has been well documented over the last four years, but at the UNC Press Blog, Lisa Materson argues that women’s activism in Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th century played a crucial role in getting Obama into the White House.

Migration played a crucial role in the story that Materson tells, and at Beacon Broadside, David Bacon argues that immigration could play a crucial role in positive changes in the future, but only if current immigration policy changes. “We need an immigration policy based on human, civil and labor rights, which looks at the reasons why people come to the U.S., and how we can end the criminalization of their status and work.”

February is celebrated across the U.S. as Black History Month. At From the Square, the NYU Press blog, however, Dayo F. Gore claims that we need to rethink Black History Month altogether. He worries that the focus on African American leaders means that “the messy and complicated details of centuries of oppression and resistance, which I believe make African American experiences so imperative in the national narrative, rarely garner attention.”

Bayesian thought, based on Bayes’ Rule, has been hotly debated for centuries, since Presbyterian Reverend Thomas Bayes came up with the premise in the mid 1700s. This week, the Yale Press Log takes a look back at the complex history of Bayesian thinking, and discusses how “the theory symbolized how religion’s role in the scientific study of physical phenomena was gradually phased out.”

No is a Chilean film that’s been nominated for the Academy Awards Best Foreign Language film. At the University of California Press Blog, Mary Helen Spooner tells the story behind the film of the 1988 “one-man presidential plebiscite” in which the people of Chile voted “no” on the question of General Pinochet’s continued governance.

This week, the University of Minnesota Press Blog has a Q&A with Leigh Fondakowski, who has spent “spent three years traveling the U.S. to interview survivors of the Jonestown massacre, many of whom have never talked publicly about the tragedy.” Fondakowski wanted to elevate public awareness of the actual events of the massacre, and to get the general public past “the catch phrase “they drank the Kool-Aid.””

February 21 was the birthday of Tadd Dameron, a crucial and underappreciated figure in the history of jazz. At the University of Michigan Press Blog, Paul Combs has a post remembering Dameron, whose “large and influential body of work and inspired, both directly and indirectly, a great number of musicians, among them Miles Davis, Frank Foster, Benny Golson, Quincy Jones, Charlie Rouse, and Horace Silver.”

“Inspirational” can be a tricky compliment. At North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press, Harilyn Rousso explains that being told she was “inspirational” for dealing with her cerebral palsy made her wonder why people “expected so little of me that even my most modest achievements could inspire [them].”

Pope Benedict XVI’s abdication continues to inspire thoughtful blog posts, the latest written by George E. Demacopoulos for the Penn Press Log. In his post, Demacopoulos looks at the Pope’s decision through the lens of St. Peter’s connection to the See of Rome.

This week is National Engineers Week. In honor of the occasion, the MIT Press blog has a Q&A with Matthew Wisnioski on what it means and will mean to be an engineer in the 21st century. Wisnioski is particularly interested in the role that engineering can and should play in politics and social justice.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post on the University of Nebraska Press blog from UNP’s new marketing manager, Martyn Beeny. In his post, Beeny discusses the challenges of taking on a new job, and of cooking an exotic recipe–designed to be made in the Antarctic with penguin–with more reasonable ingredients.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

Authors, read this post! The AMACOM Books Blog has a great post this week on how authors can have a great relationship with their publicists. Among many other pieces of advice, the post asks that authors, quite simply, be available: “They check e-mail and voicemail frequently, and get back quickly with all the information requested. They don’t go on vacation the week their book is published. If they take a short vacation in the months leading to pub date, they let their publicist know, and they make sure they are reachable for interviews.”

Last week, the Harvard University Press Blog ran the first of a pair of essays by John Burt on the historical allusions (particularly to Abraham Lincoln) in President Obama’s second inaugural address. This week, they have the second of the pair, in which Burt takes a closer look at what Obama’s historical allusions say about the ever-changing ideal of freedom in America.

Pope Benedict XVI abdicated earlier this week. At the OUPblog, Gerald O’Collins has a guest post arguing that the Pope’s decision to step down to allow a younger person to take his place is a brave one, and is, in fact, “the defining moment of his papacy.”

Martin Luther King Jr. is often seen as a uniquely American hero, but at Beacon Broadside, Lewis V. Baldwin claims that MLK described himself as “a citizen of the world” and should get more credit for his global thought and influence. Baldwin claims that we must look at King as “a leader who moved beyond the particularities of the African American and the American experiences to speak and act on behalf of a world fragmented by bigotry, injustice, intolerance, and war.”
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Judith Butler’s appearance last week at an event at Brooklyn College with Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement campaigner Omar Barghouti elicited controversy regarding both Israeli policies and the limits or threats to academic freedom.

In her recently published book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Butler engages a Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism. Butler has also been a supporter of the BDS movement and the event drew protestations from Alan Dershowitz, several New York City Council members, the New York Daily News , and a variety of Pro-Israel groups, who called for the event to be cancelled. Going further, several Council members threatened funding to Brooklyn College if the event was held.

This in turn led a diverse group of people and institutions, ranging from Mayor Bloomberg to the MLA, who supported Brooklyn College’s right to hold the event. To not hold it, they argued, would be a threat to academic freedom.

The Nation has published Butler’s remarks at Brooklyn College in full. In the following excerpt, Butler comments on the controversy:

The arguments made against this very meeting took several forms, and they were not always easy for me to parse. One argument was that BDS is a form of hate speech, and it spawned a set of variations: it is hate speech directed against either the State of Israel or Israeli Jews, or all Jewish people. If BDS is hate speech, then it is surely not protected speech, and it would surely not be appropriate for any institution of higher learning to sponsor or make room for such speech. Yet another objection, sometimes uttered by the same people who made the first, is that BDS does qualify as a viewpoint, but as such, ought to be presented only in a context in which the opposing viewpoint can be heard as well. There was yet a qualification to this last position, namely, that no one can have a conversation on this issue in the US that does not include a certain Harvard professor, but that spectacular argument was so self-inflationary and self-indicting, that I could only respond with astonishment.

So in the first case, it is not a viewpoint (and so not protected as extra-mural speech), but in the second instance, it is a viewpoint, presumably singular, but cannot be allowed to be heard without an immediate refutation. The contradiction is clear, but when people engage in a quick succession of contradictory claims such as these, it is usually because they are looking for whatever artillery they have at their disposal to stop something from happening. They don’t much care about consistency or plausibility.

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Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! We’ve got a selection of excellent snowstorm reading this week. As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

We’ll kick things off this week with a list of “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Rosa Parks,” compiled by Jeanne Theoharis at Beacon Broadside on Monday in honor of Parks’ 100th birthday. Some highlights: “Parks had been thrown off the bus a decade earlier by the same bus driver,” “The Parks family had to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott ended,” and “Parks was far more radical than has been understood.”

At the Harvard University Press Blog, John Burt has a two-part post series, the first of which was published Thursday, on President Obama’s second inaugural address, which “deserves far greater consideration than afforded by the swift turn to business [following the inauguration].” Hurt emphasizes Obama’s references to Lincoln and Lincoln’s sense of “what American nationality is.”

The controversial but critically acclaimed movie Zero Dark Thirty received a mix of plaudits and criticism for its depiction of torture in “history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man,” Osama Bin Laden. At the Texas A&M Press blog, William Clark Latham Jr. takes a look at torture through a different lens: the story of “torture American soldiers suffered at the hands of North Korean allies.”

The debate over the place of gun rights in modern American society has raged since the tragic shootings at Newtown, Connecticut, and at the JHU Press Blog, John A. Rich asks why Americans see the need to own weapons, and argues that understanding the roots of the problem of gun violence in America is crucial to finding a solution. His questions lead to more questions: “what can we do to make all of us feel safer, especially those who are most likely to be victims?”

Happy birthday, University of Georgia Press! On Monday, UG Press announced the celebration of their 75th year of publishing scholarship and literature. Congrats!

“A lot of professional pride goes into every project. Yet for all our diligence, caring, and commitment, errors are inevitable.” In an honest and heartfelt post at the AMACOM Books Blog, Senior Editor Bob Nirkind discusses errors in books from the point of view of the publisher. He talks about the difference between typos and factual errors, and how factual errors can lead to productive discussions with passionate people.

There’s been a growing emphasis at the MLA annual meeting (and elsewhere) on the digital humanities (DH), field that’s hard to define, but that “includes scholars who employ computational methods to study traditional evidence like literary texts, historical data, and cultural artifacts, and those who use humanistic methods to understand digital media and culture. This work results not only in print and digital books or journals, but also in databases, digital archives, online maps, complex visualizations, and more.” At From the Square, the NYU Press blog, Monica McCormick has a post discussing DH and the various panels on DH at the MLA meeting this year.

Over the last few years, growing concerns about injury, and in particular, growing concerns about concussions and other head trauma injuries, have necessitated a number of rule changes in major college and professional football leagues. At the OUPblog, Anthony Scioli argues that football, at least in its current incarnation, cannot last (and quotes Cicero on the dangers of gladiatorial conflict in proving his point).

Injuries, of course, are not the only problem that major college sports face. This week the University of Illinois Press blog has an interview with Albert Figone, a professor emeritus and former head football and baseball coach at Humboldt State University, discusses the history of game fixing scandals and other gambling-related problems in college sports.

At Fordham Impressions, the blog of Fordham University Press, Timothy J. Orr has a post on a fascinating Civil War story he unearthed in the summer of 2006 concerning the politics behind military promotions. “In 1862, Pennsylvania’s adjutant general had to answer a hefty stack of letters about [Lieutenant Colonel Gustavus] Town’s promotion to colonel. As I read the ill-toned epistles, the reason for the controversy became obvious. A cluster of Union generals, all of them well-known Democrats, wanted to deny Town—a Republican—his promotion to colonel. Meanwhile, state politicians—all Republicans—insisted upon Town’s elevation.”

Last November, the UN General Assembly acknowledged Palestine’s status as a state. At This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, John Quigley has a guest post looking at what this new development means for the situation in Israel, and looking back at the Six-Day War in 1967.

And finally, we’ll wrap things up with a look back at the double life of George Cukor in a Q&A with Patrick McGilligan on the University of Minnesota Press Blog. Cukor was a famous “Golden Age” Hollywood director, and McGilligan claims that Cukor’s life and, in particular, his sexual orientation and the prejudices he had to face because of it, teach us lessons about the time period, but also about how people deserve to be treated.

Well, that will do it for this week! We hope that you enjoyed this edition of our UP Roundup. As always, please post any thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading, and stay warm this weekend!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! Everybody is back from break, and we’ve got a ton of great posts this week! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

We’ll get things kicked off this week with a guest post by Christopher Kuner at the OUPblog on an important topic: the politics of data privacy. Due to the ever-changing nature of the field and the necessarily international nature of any regulation or law, coming up with an acceptable and effective system of data privacy is a tricky process. As Kuner puts it, “Part of the problem is that while data protection and privacy issues have global ramifications, the legal framework for them is still very much a matter of local or, at best, regional regulation.”

This week there were a couple of posts touching on different aspects of environmentalism. At Island Press Field Notes, Charles C. Chester has a guest post thinking about “the conservation toolbox,” how it’s changed over time, and how we need to reconceive the idea of a “toolbox” altogether. Over at This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, William M. Alley and Rosemarie Alley have a guest post about the ongoing problem of how to deal with nuclear waste now that President Obama has ended the work at Yucca Mountain.

Immigration was also a hot topic this week. At the Stanford University Press Blog, Jody Agius Vallejo has a post examining the recent immigration reform plans from President Obama and the “Gang of Eight” senators. Vallejo claims that if “Republicans want to charm the Latino population, and do what is best for America’s future, they must support a rapid citizenship pathway that does not include contingencies that are impossible to meet.” Meanwhile, at the UNC Press Blog, Lara Putnam is glad that immigration reform is finally in the national political conversation, and she argues that family should play a crucial role in discussions of immigration reform moving forward. “Some of the deepest costs of our prohibitionist immigration system have to do with family. And they’re not just emotional costs—they’re economic costs as well.”

Transnational adoptions, and, in particular, the assumptions made by non-adopted people about the process of adoption, are the topic of the moment for Kristi Brian at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press. Brian starts by examining the recent protests in Moscow against the “adoption ban that prevents U.S. citizens from adopting Russian children,” and argues that “the fact of the matter is, as much as we hate to admit it, transnational adoption is a marketplace driven by and reflective of capitalist modes of production.”

Congrats to Princeton University Press on their shiny new blog! It looks great! Check it out in this repost of a fascinating Huffington Post article by Eric J. Heller on the age-old phenomenon of unexplainable booms. “Oddly, the surface does not need to move very far nor very fast to launch exceedingly loud sound resembling cannon fire or a sonic boom. What it does need is a lot of acceleration. But how can something have huge acceleration, yet not wind up moving very far or very fast?”

Science and literature are not commonly seen as complimentary disciplines (quite the opposite, in many cases), but at the JHU Press Blog, Theresa M. Kelley has a guest post discussing “how literature meets, or sidles up to, science.” Kelley focuses in particular on 18th and 19th century literature and the life sciences of the time, which is a combination which seems even less likely than science and literature generally.

Over at the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Steve Baker looks at a similar topic, but from a very different angle. Baker examines the use of animals in art, but focuses on the ethical implications of this use. As he puts it, his “key concern was to articulate the “voice” of these artists, and to show how they think and how they work.”

This week, the Penn Press Log has a post in their “Medieval Monday” series that shows how animals were used in art even in the ninth century. The post looks at an Old Irish lyric poem called “Pangur Bán” or “The Monk and His Cat.” As Susan Crane puts it in a passage quoted in the post, “Anthropomorphism can cut in many directions, but in “Pangur Bán” the consistent strategy is to strike analogies that reinforce the scholar’s bemused admiration for Pangur with his self-deprecating account of his own efforts to work well.”

We’ll wrap up this week’s Roundup with a couple of posts on Hall of Fame baseball stars. At the University of Missouri Press blog, they’ve got a Q&A with James N. Giglio on his book Musial, as well as his experiences researching and writing about Stan the Man’s life. And over at Beacon Brooadside, they have a guest post from Howard Bryant looking back at a relatively unknown part of the career of Jackie Robinson: a tryout with the Boston Red Sox. As one might guess, the tryout did not go particularly well: “Robinson himself was satisfied with his performance, although by the time he left Fenway he was smoldering about what he felt to be a humiliating charade.”

Well, that will do it for this week! We hope that you enjoyed this edition of our UP Roundup. As always, please post any thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! We hope you are all staying nice and warm in this cold snap. As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision. A couple of academic blogs had excellent posts in honor of the occasion. First of all, the UNC Press Blog has a post from Marc Stein in which he breaks down and discusses five of the most significant myths about the contents and meanings of the decision. At Beacon Broadside, Carole Joffe discusses initial feelings about the decisions and then examines the “rapid rise of an anti-abortion movement after the Roe decision.”

The sad death of Aaron Swartz has raised questions about “the doggedness with which federal prosecutors were pursuing [Swartz],” as well as questions about the morality of copyright law in research. This week, the Harvard University Press Blog takes a look at the nature of prosecutorial discretion through the lens of Swartz’s case.

Publishing a book is almost always a long process, particularly in the world of academic publishing where peer review is a crucial part of the publishing system. However, at the JHU Press Blog, JHU Press editorial director Greg Britton tells the story of a recent JHU Press book that was deemed important and timely enough to be published as an “instant book.” Coming from the Johns Hopkins Summit on Reducing Gun Violence in America, the book, Reducing Gun Violence in America, had to be published in a mere fourteen days!

At the OUPblog, Karen Schiltz asks a frightening question that many parents around the country are forced to confront in the wake of the recent tragic school shootings: “Could my child be responsible for the next tragedy?” In her sobering post, Schiltz addresses problems with the diagnoses of mental conditions in children and offers advice on how best to seek help for a child.

The University of California Press Blog has a post in memory of former UC Press director James H. Clark, who passed away last week. Clark led the UC Press for twenty five years, and had been in the publishing industry since 1960.

The use of art in determining and defining who was and who was not a Nazi perpetrator after World War II is a fascinating and complicated subject, and it’s the topic of a guest post by Paul B. Jaskot at the University of Minnesota Press Blog. Jaskot believes that the role of art history in “highlighting the political function of art and architecture” is an important one.

Tonight is the debut of the latest film featuring the “master heister” Parker. Yesterday, the Chicago Blog, the blog of the University of Chicago Press, ran an article delving into the fascinating and somewhat checkered past of Parker films. More importantly, they provide a handy list of ways to avoid being robbed by Parker. Best piece of advice: “Don’t have anything he wants. We recommend possessing only books. He’s not much of a reader, that Parker.”

Today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday! In honor of the occasion, the MIT Press blog has an excerpt from Rosalind Krauss’s work on modernism, The Optical Unconscious. Naturally, the excerpt focuses on Woolf, and, in particular, on her thoughts on Roger Fry and chess.

In the election in November, thousands of people were willing to wait in line out of a sense of civic duty to vote. At From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson asks why people are willing to wait so proudly for their chance to vote in an election but not so willing to wait for their chance to serve in the judicial system on a jury.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post from the University of Virginia Press blog in which Jeffrey Greene examines the strange and interesting life of oysters as a suggestive artistic symbol in the paintings of the 16th and 17th century Dutch masters. Interestingly enough, Greene finds that these painted oysters “don’t look anything like the ones my father, brother, and I collected and ate during the years I grew up in New England, nor do they look like the most common oysters in France, a country famed since Roman times as Europe’s greatest oyster producer. Clearly, the seventh-century oysters in the paintings were rounder and flatter than the typical creuses, oysters with a cupped shell that are consumed worldwide.”

Well, that will do it for this week! We hope that you enjoyed this edition of our UP Roundup. As always, please post any thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

Here in NYC, the mayor’s office and teachers union have been in the news this week, and not for positive reasons. Fittingly, this week Voices in Education, the blog of Harvard Education Publishing, has an excerpt from The End of Exceptionalism in American Education by Jeffrey R. Henig in which he details the struggle between Michael Bloomberg and the NY City Council over teacher layoffs in spring of 2011.

This week at the OUPblog, Tim Bayne has a fascinating guest post in which he discusses how belief-formation affects the way we behave, and, as a consequence of this connection, how we should judge those who form beliefs that are generally seen as harmful or evil. He takes the examples of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Anders Breivik as a way to get a true-life handle on this problem.

The burning cross is one of the symbols most associated with the Klu Klux Klan. However, in an interview with the UNC Press Blog, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey explain that the relationship between the KKK and religion was a complicated one, and one that didn’t arise until the 1910s or 1920s.

The annual AHA conference took place at the beginning of January, and this week the Harvard University Press Blog has a piece looking at “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age” panel, and, in particular, Michael Pollan’s challenge to professional historians to embrace the narrative techniques that allow popular histories to make bestsellers lists over more academic works.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was allowed to expire at the end of 2012. At From the Squre, the NYU Press Blog, Leigh Goodmark considers what the lapse of VAWA means, and suggests that Congress use the delay to refocus the legislation to allow VAWA to be revolutionary once more: “The criminal justice response to domestic violence has had eighteen years of dedicated funding with underwhelming results. The time has come to think more creatively about how to achieve justice for people subjected to abuse. The delay in passing VAWA provides us with that opportunity.”

At the Yale Press Log, Mark Harrison has a guest post looking back at the mass protests against South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in the summer of 2008. At the time, South Korean fears of tainted American beef were running high, and President Lee’s decision to lift the country’s ban on imported beef from America sparked discontented citizens into protests against his administration.

At Fordham Impressions, the blog of Fordham University Press, Matthew Isham takes issue with the idea that political media bias is a new phenomenon. While quoting commentators on both ends of the political spectrum who have recently blamed media outlets for various political wrongs, Isham looks back over the history of media in the US to trace the idea of biased media up to the present.

“How do you write about somebody so famous in American history that a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, a Maryland parkway, and elementary schools in at least nine states are named after her?” At the JHU Press Blog, Marian Moser Jones discusses the challenges of writing about a well-known historical figure, Clara Barton, in her particular case. Most important, in Moser’s view, is “watch[ing] out for that “easy” button.”

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post from Deborah Vargas at the University of Minnesota Press Blog. In her guest post, Vargas discusses the music of the Chicano borderlands (complete with a Youtube soundtrack). She discusses an important lesson she learned while studying Chicana music: “before I could listen to Chicana singers of decades earlier, I had to learn how to listen for them.”

Well, that will do it for this week! We hope that you enjoyed this edition of our UP Roundup. As always, please post any thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Welcome back from the holiday break, and welcome back to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

We’ll kick off the new year with a couple of fascinating and thought-provoking posts from the University of Minnesota Press Blog. First, they have the discussion delivered by UMP director Doug Armato at a MLA 2013 roundtable on serial scholarship and the future role of scholarly publishing in scholarly communication. The UMP blog also has an article by Kathleen Nolan on what really happens when police have an increased presence at schools.

Racism in European soccer is an ongoing problem, especially among fans. The recent incident involving AC Milan player Kevin-Prince Boateng has brought the issue back into the public eye over the last couple of weeks. North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press, is running a blog post from Andy Markovits addressing the responsibility of fans in fixing the racial issues plaguing big-league European soccer.

At This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press, Charles Tripp offers an explanation of various resistance movements in the Middle East over the last few years. He finds particularly interesting (and darkly humorous) the similarity of responses to resistance coming from the resisted, those in power.

“Granted, everyone hates the idea of jury duty.” At From the Square, the NYU Press blog, Pete Hahn offers a personal anecdote about and an argument for why jury duty really does matter. As he explains, “The wheels of justice move slowly. Really slowly. And this may be why jury duty gets such a bad rap…. But all of this is on purpose. You need to go slowly to establish the facts. You need to go slowly to give everyone a chance to testify, even if it seems like they are telling the same story as the previous witness. You need to go slowly to avoid reaching hasty conclusions.”

Richard Nixon would have been 100 years old this Wednesday. Taking this chance to look back at one of our most complicated and infamous political figures, the Harvard University Press has an excerpt from No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America detailing “how Nixon won the allegiance of conservative power-brokers without actually delivering the reforms they sought. (Spoiler: Portnoy takes the fall.)”

There are many unsolved mysteries about the nature of the universe, and about humankind’s place in it. This week, the OUPblog and guest poster Jason Rosenhouse take a shot at answering one of these mysteries: What, exactly do mathematicians do? Rosenhouse comes up with an unusual but interesting answer to that question: “You see, more than anything else, to be a mathematician is to be part of a community. Whatever else it is, mathematics is a social activity undertaken by human beings to further human goals and purposes.”

On a somewhat similar note, Rafe Sagarin over at Island Press Field Notes has a post delving into one of the most important and universal aspects of what scientists do: attempt to face their own biases. He quotes a caution from Ed Ricketts: “When a person asks, “Why?” in a given situation, he usually deeply expects, and in any case receives, only a relational answer in place of the definitive “because” which he thinks he wants.”

At the UNC Press blog, Fiona Deans Halloran has a fascinating guest post about the ways that famous political cartoonist Thomas Nast (two of his most famous creations are the depictions of Democrats as donkeys and Republicans as elephants) transcended and broadened common conceptions of literacy. While many people (notable among them, Boss Tweed) claimed that Nast’s effectiveness came from the fact that those who couldn’t read could still understand his cartoons, Halloran points out that Nast’s work was deeply literary, and used images and language from Shakespeare’s plays, in particular.

Finally, we’ll wrap this Roundup up with a couple of posts on the art of making a book from a collection of letters. First, from the UVA Press blog, Alan G. James discusses the process of turning the letters between Henry James and British Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and his wife, Lady Wolseley into The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife: Henry James’s Letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley, 1878–1913. And then, at the JHU Press Blog, Jonathan F. S. Post discusses how one “selects” letters for a book called The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht. “The tricky adjective “Selected” in a book’s title usually means something different to readers than editors, more often taken by readers in the concessional sense (as in “not complete”), whereas editors are more alert to the problem of plenitude and the competition it instills.”

Well, that will do it for this week! We hope that you enjoyed this edition of our UP Roundup. As always, please post any thoughts in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best posts from the blogs of academic publishers! The holidays are fast approaching, but the blogs of academic publishers are as active as ever. As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

As Superstorm Sandy came ashore in New Jersey and New York, people used social media to tell the story of what was happening around them. At the OUPblog, oral historian Caitlin Tyler-Richards talks about this new phenomenon: multi-media documentation of natural disasters taking place in real time and viewable all over the world.

Charles Rosen passed away this past Sunday. Both the OUPblog and the Harvard University Press Blog have posts honoring his life and impressive career as a pianist, musicologist, and critic.

Chinese writer Mo Yan recently accepted his Nobel prize in literature, and in his acceptance speech he argued that some level of censorship is necessary, which did not endear him to those (including Salmon Rushdie, Ai Weiwei, and Liu Xiaobo, among others) who had already accused Mo of being, among other things, a “patsy of the régime.” However, the Harvard University Press Blog looks at Perry Link’s discussion of the award and Mo’s career, and finds that his critics might be missing part of the story.

At the JHU Press Blog this Wednesday, Janine Barchas celebrates the 237th birthday of Jane Austen, but also wonders whether “the new Cult of Jane challenging the iconic status that The Bard has long held in our culture.” Contrasting Austen’s anonymity in her life with the Hollywood star status her works enjoy today, Barchas marvels at the twists of fate that turn writers into one-name legends. (Also worth checking out on the JHU Press Blog: the ongoing The Doctor Is In series, where JHU Press authors discuss the latest developments in health and medicine. This week, the topic is epidurals.)

It’s now been over a year since the Occupy Wall Street movement first started to make headlines. The MIT Press blog has collected a year’s worth of articles from TDR, October, and The Baffler on OWS. Taken together, these pieces help clarify and explain the deeds, causes, and effects of the Occupy movement.

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There are, to be sure, many challenges ahead for university presses but as a recent panel suggests, there are also many exciting opportunities to find new readers and disseminate important new ideas.

The panel, which consisted of university press heads Peter Dougherty (director, Princeton University Press), James Jordan (president, Columbia University Press), John Donatich (director, Yale University Press), and Niko Pfund (president, Oxford University Press), was recently covered in Publishers Weekly. The panelists discussed university press performance in the past decade, the future of the book, and what it means to own an idea, and answered questions from a small group of journalists.

In particular, the participants stated the importance of university presses in investing over the long-term in readership and in spreading scholarship and important ideas to both an academic and a non-scholarly audience. Turning to the future, the heads of the presses stressed the importance of adapting to the digital future, improving on metadata to maximize searchability, and seeking out new readers particularly in India and China.

As noted in the Publishers Weekly article:

Several comments picked up on ideas from Dougherty’s July 23 article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Global University Press.” As he wrote: “University presses can become an even larger and more influential force in the global theater of ideas by capitalizing on two converging trends: the growth of global scholarship and the expansion of digital communications networks.” Though university presses reach a smaller audience of readers, in difficult economic times and rapid technological change, they remain committed to their authors and, as Jordan said, will pursue the “new digital reader” and “champion the spirit of innovation.”

After taking a brief hiatus, we return with our roundup of some of the great posts from our fellow university presses:

What can New Yorkers learn from Gulf Coast residents as they rebuild from Hurricane Sandy? Tom Wooten, author of We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina describes some of the possible lessons in a post on Beacon Broadside.

In another Sandy-related post, John R. Gillis, author of The Human Shore: Sea Coasts in History, argues on the University of Chicago Press blog that we now live on the sea but not with it. He suggests that this attitude has led to poor planning, including the present designs now being made to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy.

In light of the recent International Day of Persons and Disabilities and the G.O.P rejection of a disabilities treaty, the Duke University Press highlight some of their excellent titles in disability studies.

The release of Spielberg’s Lincoln has given Harvard University Press the opportunity to highlight some of their remarkable books on the Civil War. Their post What Was the South Seceding To?, previews the forthcoming and much-anticipated River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, by Walter Johnson. The post also includes a video with Johnson discussing the book.

Got a gamer you need to get a gift for? Look know further than the MIT Press blog continues its gamer gift guide with a look at A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, by Jesper Juul. In the book, Juul writes about how video games have changed as the audience for games has extended beyond young men and boys.

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For university post week, we offer two posts on the importance of university presses and their possible futures. The first is by Sheldon Pollock, who is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. Pollock calls upon the university and its faculty to become more involved with university presses. The second from Jennifer Crewe, editorial director and associate director at Columbia University Press, describes university presses’ willingness and ability to innovate to meet new intellectual and economic challenges. (Click here for the post by Jennifer Crewe)

Next up on the tour is the University of North Carolina Press.

The series South Asia across the Disciplines was founded four years ago with a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation by Jennifer Crewe (Columbia U. Press), Alan Thomas (U. of Chicago Press), Lynne Whithey (then U. of California Press), and myself as general editor. We conceived of SAAD not just as a series to publish the most vulnerable of all academic publications–monographs (strike one) that are also first books (strike two) concerning the non-West (strike three)–but as an experiment in an alternative economic model for a university press.

I was convinced then and remain no less convinced today that university presses deserve vastly more support than they are receiving from their universities. Few university presses receive support from their universities, and even that has in many cases been steadily declining. But although it is easy to forget in the era of mass corporatization, the purpose of the university is to create and transmit knowledge, and transmission must include publication. Publication is the hemoglobin of scholarly life, and academic publishers are and will remain central to scholarly publication even as we supplement print with electronic books. The presses and their faculty boards endeavor to provide serious peer review and editing, and thus ensure that we make available to the public readable, responsible scholarship and not the mere piles of data that most dissertations represent.

In the absence of central administration support, bottom-line thinking can sometime overwhelm editorial decision-making, though in such cases editors are only enacting the role that their economic precariousness dictates. The option of becoming more and more like a trade publisher is seductive but the risks to scholarship and the distinctiveness of university press publishing are great. The fundamental differences in aspiration and obligation between academic and trade publishing need to be very carefully registered. And that difference should carry with it a difference in economic logic. University presses must insulate themselves from the vagaries of the market, and universities must help provide this insulation. Unlike trade publishing, the decisions of university presses must be guided by other forces beyond competition and profit.

So how are universities to support their presses? For one thing they can write more checks, understanding again that they fail in their purpose if they fail to disseminate the knowledge they produce. If however, as some believe, the days when presses can expect a consistent flow of financial support and check-writing are past, there are still many other things the university can do to help presses and many ways in which the two can and should work together.

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