University Press Roundup
Our weekly roundup of recent blog posts and features from other academic presses:
It is National Poetry Month, so we’ll kick things off this week with an excellent poem posted on the Minnesota Historical Society Press blog, the 10,000 Books Weblog. It’s hard to go wrong when reading poetry about rhubarb!
Earth Day is April 22, and the MITPressLog is running a series of posts in honor of the occasion. This week, Samantha MacBride gives a number of facts about the dark side of recycling in the bigger picture of environmental action. Meanwhile, David Rothery writes a post on a very extraterrestrial topic at the OUPblog: Is there life on Mars?
A less happy upcoming occasion is Tax Day, April 15. The American Internal Revenue Code is famously tangled and confusing, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Press Log has recruited historian Molly Michelmore to try to explain exactly why this is so.
Harvard University Press features a guest post by and video conversation with scholar Robin D. G. Kelley on the fascinating history and surprising origins of jazz. In particular, he takes issue with the idea that musicians in the 1950s saw themselves as part of a uniform group playing “jazz” music.
If you are unacquainted with the legends of the Golden Dog, a tablet in Quebec City, McGill-Queen’s University Press offers a chance to catch up on the “heroic past and promising future of the Dominion of Canada” with an excerpt of William Kirby’s 1877 Le Chien d’or, or The Golden Dog.
The Temple University Press blog, North Philly Notes, has a detailed interview with political expert Hal Gullen on the Pat Toomey-Joe Sestak Senate race of 2010, one of the most closely contested and important contests of that election year, and on some ideas that candidates running in 2012 should keep in mind.
Princeton University Press continues their excellent Election 101 series with an article by sociologist Jennifer Lena on the use of music in political branding, complete with a selection of campaign songs from “I Like Ike” to “Game On – a Song for Rick Santorum.”
Yesterday, April 12, was the anniversary of the death of the great Roman tragedian and philosopher Seneca. The multiple means of his suicide (he tried slitting his wrists and taking hemlock before finally managing to do the deed in his bath) are well known, but at the OUPblog, Emily Watson looks back at the other reasons Seneca is still discussed today (complete with a tragic quiz).
Beacon Broadside takes on a topic that will grow in importance over the next few decades: what will the first generations to be medicated with various psychiatric drugs en masse be like as adults?
Questions of gender and sexuality are hugely important in modern Islam, and at the UNC Press Blog, Sa’diyya Shaikh has a guest post about the work of famed Sufi poet and scholar Ibn ‘Arabi and it’s relevance to gender debates in Islam today.
Following from last week’s excellent interview about the art of translation, Yale University Press announces the creation of a new website aimed at providing English translations of overlooked but important works from all around the world.
Like something? Feel that we missed something? Let us know in the comments!
