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.)

This week on the Beacon Press blog, Kay Whitlock discusses five myths about violence in America in an attempt to highlight the distinction between the widespread perception of hate crimes in America as isolated and individually-motivated incidents, and the idea of a culturally-perpetuated, structural violence that she believes more accurately characterizes these events.

Duke University Press has posted an article, “How to Start a New Journal,” that brings attention to five new journals, including the Transgender Studies Quarterly, that have been founded in response to new pressing issues, calling attention to the merits of the academic journal as a versatile, accessible medium for discussion about ideas that demand attention.

In a post on the Harvard Education Publishing Group blog, Shayla Reese Griffin discusses the discrepancy between the belief in segregation as a problem of the past and the alarming reality of what many U.S. classrooms today still look like. Her solution is a recommitment to the active practice of integration, beginning with a collective and mindful undoing of unconscious fears, biases, and prejudices.

In light of International Translation Day, Helen Constantine discusses the implications of widespread translation practices in a post on the Oxford University Press blog. It isn’t considered strange, for example, for a writer from Gaza to write his novel in English, but there are very few English writers who would write a novel in Arabic. Constantine brings up fascinating questions about translation, building up barriers, and breaking them down. (For further information about this fascinating topic, check out two Columbia UP books: The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by Minae Mizumura, and Born Translated, by Rebecca Walkowitz!)

This past week was Banned Books Week (September 27 through October 3), and the University of Texas Press has announced that it will be launching a new comic book studies series called the World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series, which will publish books that bring an analytical and interdisciplinary approach to defining the comic book studies field. The blog has included an excerpt of the recent issue of The Velvet Light Trap dealing with censorship in the comic book industry.

A recent post on the Yale University Press blog discusses an trend in state-level justice reforms in many southern states as well as Utah, Pennsylvania, and California that make it easier for those incarcerated to gain access to education and training that can greatly improve their prospects in post-incarcerated life. This has given rise to the hopes of a shift of penal reform in a less punitive direction.

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