University Press Roundup

University Press Roundup

Welcome to our weekly roundup of the best articles 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. (And look back at our University Press Roundup Manifesto to see why we do this post every Friday.)

Wilfred Laurier University Press has recently been told that WLU will be withdrawing the support that the press had previously received from the university, as WLUP is “not essential to the vision and mission of the University. There’s a Hole in the Bucket, the blog of the University of Alberta Press, has more information on this situation, and provides a link to a petition to reverse the decision.

Hunting for a job is always frightening, and writing résumés and cover letters is a particularly intimidating part of the process. At the AMACOM Books Blog, Scott Bennett has a two part interview in which he offers his expertise in résumé styling in order to make this one part of finding a job a bit more palatable.

The “Swedish model” of reducing prostitution, sex trafficking, and violence against sex workers has been much discussed recently online. However, at Beacon Broadside, Melinda Chateauvert is less than sanguine about the often-lauded strategies that Sweden has employed. She argues that “the violence and stigma against people in the sex industry must be understood from sex workers’ points of view, not a “female POV,” whatever that is.”

A great deal of information concerning the use of torture by United States military and intelligence organizations has come out recently with releasing of the Feinstein Report. At fifteeneightyfour, the blog of Cambridge University Press, David P. Forsythe attempts to use the new data to add details to the general story of the US actions following September 11, 2001.

When Amy L. Stone wrote Gay Rights at the Ballot Box, which discussed the period between 1974 and 2009, it seemed that there would continue to be marriage bans voted into law for some time. In a post at the University of Minnesota Blog, however, she writes about the flurry of court cases overturning these laws that have happened over the past several years, and about the future of gay rights at the ballot box.

The UNC Press Blog has posted a fascinating excerpt from Shabana Mir’s Muslim American Women on Campus, in which Mir looks at Muslim American students engage in various types of leisure practices common at colleges around the US, particularly those involving the consumption of alcohol.

Should different ways of giving birth (in this case, C-sections and vaginal births) be treated as “being the same”? Theresa Morris argues that, while she understands the urge to do so, these two methods of giving birth should absolutely not be treated as being equivalent, as doing so can reinforce the mistaken notion that women are in control of their birth process in today’s world.

The aforementioned Feinstein report was not the only recently released report on the United States’ use of torture. At the OUPblog, Rebecca Gordon discusses the report issued by the UN Committee Against Torture, explaining some key points and arguing that a large part of the problem lies in American law, rather than just in the action of military and intelligence agencies.

In celebration of the holidays, the Princeton University Press Blog is running a 12-post series of The Twelve Grimm Days of Christmas, in which they are posting a story a day from their new translation of the first edition of the famous fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. One fun example: the seventh story is the story of a farmer’s son who happens to be born as a hedgehog rather than a human.

Finally, the University of Washington Press Blog has a interesting post up by David B. Williams about Bertha, the tunnel-borer that has been stuck under Seattle for a year. As the blog describes the problem at hand: “New reports indicate that Pioneer Square has sunk an inch since Thanksgiving and that a number of historic buildings and roadways are newly compromised by the beleaguered tunnel project.”

Thanks for reading! As always, we hope that you enjoyed the links. Please let us know what you think in the comments!

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