February 21, 2023. As the first anniversary of Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine nears, our community’s resources for understanding the region and this brutal war continue to offer much-needed knowledge and context.
Below is an updated and expanded list of books, journal articles, booklists, and commentary from our member presses and their expert authors, essential reading to all who seek to understand the ongoing crisis.
Continue reading On Russia’s Invasion of UkraineAfter Charlottesville, local debates over the place of Confederate monuments in United States public places roared into the national spotlight. With a broad knowledge of the fields of study that have examined the history, policy, and cultural meanings of such monuments, University Press of Kansas Editor-in-Chief Joyce Harrison compiled for the Association a list of relevant university-press-published scholarship for us to share as part of the #CharlottesvilleCurriculum effort. There are many other deeply urgent aspects to what happened in Charlottesville on August 12, and several Association members have also compiled valuable resource lists under the #CharlottesvilleCurriculum tag. More can also be found in sections of the Books for Understanding: Race Relations in the US bibliography.
Compiled and introduced by Joyce Harrison
As more and more Confederate monuments and symbols are removed in US cities and towns, many people new to the issue have wondered why. Is it a bit extreme? Are we erasing history by removing them?
The books in this list were written by people who have spent their lives and careers studying how Americans remembered victory and defeat, how southerners honored the Confederate dead, and what monuments meant when they were built—and continue to mean—as our troubled past haunts us, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War.
University presses can help us understand and allow us to contribute to informed discussion and debate.
After while supremacists and Neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, leading to violence and the tragic killing of anti-racist protester Heather Heyer, many groups and individuals have used social media to point fellow citizens to books, articles, teaching resources, and other materials to help understand what is happening throughout the United States. The members of the Association of University Presses publish scholarship that helps all of us know and understand our history, our present, and our possible futures; and a number of member presses have contributed resource lists to the #CharlottesvilleCurriculum and #CharlottesvilleSyllabus effort. Below are links to these reading lists.
If we’ve missed any #CharlottesvilleCurriculum posts by Association members, please email details to bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org.
Continue reading #CharlottesvilleCurriculum: Resources from the UP Community
One small step for collaborationby Ellen Faran, Director, The MIT Press
March 20 marks the liftoff of “University Presses in Space,” a website promoting university press books about outer space and space exploration. The site, www.upinspace.org, features 30 titles selected by the 15 participating presses as among their best space books. These titles are cross-linked with the individual book pages in presses’ web catalogs so that we may share web traffic. In addition, all the presses and their authors may share links to the site through catalogs, email, social media, and at exhibits and meetings.
The MIT Press conceived of this joint promotion in conjunction with our lead Spring 2014 title, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. We worked closely with three partners—the University Press of Florida, Purdue University Press, and the University of Nebraska Press—to develop the idea and then invited all AAUP member presses to join as participants. MIT designed and launched the site; Nebraska will then take over the site after it enters its regular orbit. Nebraska has arranged to bring “University Presses in Space” to the attention of attendees at SpaceFest (“THE event for the space enthusiast”) in Pasadena this May.
We believe that space buffs, as well as general readers interested in space, don’t stop at just one book. We believe that they appreciate the quality of university press publishing. Thus we hope that the discovery experience provided by “University Presses in Space” will stimulate sales, both for the featured titles and the many more space books to be found by exploring university press lists. The site includes a link to AAUP’s Books for Understanding which has a Space Flight category.
This is a modest experiment in collaborative promotion; modest in part because the site does not offer a combined shopping experience. But we hope that the response to “University Presses in Space” will point us toward effective ways to promote books in specific fields across our community, throughout the galaxy, and beyond.
Please share the news with any space explorers in your part of the universe. Our Twitter hashtag is #upspacebooks.
by Juliet Barney, AAUP Marketing and Social Media Intern
This week, AAUP published the newest Books for Understanding list: Books for Understanding: Higher Education. To accompany the list, I interviewed one of the AAUP’s key higher education acquisitions editors, Katie Keeran at Rutgers University Press. I was very excited and willing to speak with Keeran, to further understand her role as an acquisitions editor as well as her experience with developing a higher education list.
Keeran received her BA in history from Rutgers and her MA in English from Montclair State University, where she taught writing before moving onto a career in publishing. She started at Rutgers University Press as an editorial assistant, began acquiring books part-time, and eventually was promoted to working full time as an acquisitions editor at the press. Since then, Keeran has acquired a number of manuscripts for titles on higher education including Why Public Higher Education Should be Free, Doing Diversity in Higher Education, and many more. Many of Rutger’s titles are included in the new Books for Understanding list.
What is your favorite part of working as an acquisitions editor at Rutgers?
The best part about working as an acquisitions editor is having stimulating conversations with authors about their work and of course reading and helping to shape that work. It is very rewarding to see a project through from the early stages to a final book. In this profession we are lucky enough to always be engaged in the thrill and challenge of intellectual activity. I loved being a student, and as an editor you never stop learning.
As an acquisitions editor, who do you work closely with and how does everyone work together in the publishing process at Rutgers?
We have under 20 people on staff at Rutgers University Press, and we all work very closely together. I often speak with my fellow editors and my director about projects that I have underway and lists that I am building, and the acquisitions department works closely with the pre-press and marketing departments as we move manuscripts through production and begin selling books. We also have a wonderful cohort of dedicated student interns who we love working with and value greatly. Everyone’s door is open and we have a great, familial dynamic on staff.
How do you find and decide on higher ed titles? What do you look for?
I seek out authors whose research and writing focus on recent developments and public policy issues in higher education in the United States, and am particularly drawn to books that examine key concerns faced by our colleges and universities, families and students, and the faculty and staff who work at these institutions, and ideally suggest possible solutions to these problems. Books that speak to a wide audience are especially appealing.
What areas of higher ed do you focus on for the Rutgers list?
We welcome classroom books as well as books for practitioners, administrators, and policy-makers. I am especially keen on manuscripts that explore current trends such as rising tuition and student debt, the expansion of administrative posts and salaries, the crisis in the humanities and the arts, controversy in sports programs, corporate universities and for-profit colleges, and online education. I am also interested in ongoing discussions around tenure and academic freedom, affirmative action, campus labor, and issues concerning gender, racial, ethnic, and class dynamics in higher education, as well as books that examine the position of other minority groups in institutions of higher learning.
We have a vibrant list in the social sciences and humanities, and projects come out of diverse disciplines. For instance, we have a book called Sex and the University that that examines student journalism and sex columns in particular, but we also publish sociological books, such as When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education, which examines how the affirmative action policy in California affected the demographics and dynamics of a student organization.
Once you’ve chosen them, how do you market the titles? Do the marketing strategies vary for each title or is there a form you follow?
We often promote like books together. So our recent higher ed books would be grouped together in, say, a Chronicle ad or a direct mail piece but each book would receive individualized publicity, sales, merchandising placement, social media, and e-marketing attention. We also vary efforts based on whether the book is written for a trade audience, the academic community, practitioners, in this instance, educators, policy-makers, or a mix of multiple audiences.
What are some of the most interesting projects you have lined up? What are you the most excited about?
Two new books that I am especially excited about are Why Public Higher Education Should be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities by Robert Samuels and Checklist for Change: Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise by Robert Zemsky. These are both innovative and forward-thinking books that are sparking some important conversations and ultimately could lead to changes in educational policies. Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower is another book of ours that is making a big splash and generating a good deal of discussion about the family-friendly policies of the university and the implications for women’s careers in academia.
I have an incoming proposal for a book on disability in higher education, which I am hoping will be great.
What areas of research do you currently find the most interesting, and why?
I am drawn to all kinds of books–from those that tell a compelling story about how communities, individuals, and institutions are impacted by certain policies, to explorations of cultural movements, to books that examine a more global picture of higher education at a national level. I suppose one kind of project that I find especially compelling are those that challenge the status quo in bold ways and make normative claims for how we as a society can rethink our priorities and effect change.
Writing in the Sunday New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler (“In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism”) examines the focus on the history of capitalism by a new generation of scholars. The support of university presses has been key to the new discipline’s development, as editors see innovative scholarship and exciting new topics in recent dissertations. (This is no surprise to AAUP: the work of university press editors has often been foundational to emerging disciplines, such as African-American studies, postmodernism, queer studies…the list goes on.)
Schuessler features a number of UP books and series, including:
And there are, of course, more such titles from these and other university presses that are helping to shape the new history of capitalism.
The collected essays of Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (University of Chicago Press, 2011), were called “essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the field.” by Mihm.The study of the history of capitalism is deeply intertwined with other topics in historical scholarship, and readers will find much that is relevant in several AAUP Books for Understanding resources, including book lists on Financial Crises, Economic Inequality and Justice, Slavery and Jim Crow, and the social safety net.