University Press Roundup
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.
Today, the Columbia Law School is hosting a symposium honoring the “outstanding contributions to the field of gender and sexuality law” of Patricia Williams. Williams joins the company of past honorees Martha Nussbaum, Judith Butler, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Harvard University Press Blog has a post highlighting some of the works and ideas of Williams, with a focus on her surprisingly candid and personal writings on law: “Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you deserve to know that it’s a bad morning. I am very depressed. It always takes a while to sort out what’s wrong, but it usually starts with some kind of perfectly irrational thought such as: I hate being a lawyer.”
Beacon Broadside, the blog of Beacon Press, wrapped up their coverage of Black History Month this week with an interview with Sarah Garland focusing on the impacts of desegregation. Garland herself was a student “bused to an integrated school,” and her discussion of her experiences is fascinating: “I think the experience made the persistence of poverty and inequality in our society vividly real to me.”
At An Akronism, the blog of the University of Akron Press, press director Thomas Bacher offers an examination of the place of college sports and the place of academic publishing in the total university experience. As he says, “I don’t want to compare NCAA sports to university presses, but it’s hard not to do.”
Donald McCaig, at the University of Virginia Press blog, is offering up a serialized account of the story of Fly, a sheepdog. This week, in his second post, McCaig discusses the “intimate working partnership” he has with his dogs, and gives an account of the intense training he and Fly underwent.
The Iliad is known primarily as a tale of war and wrath, but David F. Elmer finds the political decision making depicted in Homer’s epic to be more intriguing. In a guest post at the JHU Press Blog, Elmer explains that he “became fascinated by the ways in which a poem that focuses so relentlessly on the competition for prestige among powerful individuals (Agamemnon, Achilles) simultaneously projects consensus as the ultimate political ideal.”
Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post at the OUPblog from Guy Halsall, in which Halsall offers us ten ways to rethink the common conceptions of King Arthur and of Britain in Arthur’s time. Perhaps most important on his list: “Start thinking in terms of a mess. Forget the neat lines on the map, the orderly ‘front-line’ of traditional views. Think of a kaleidoscope. A mess is maybe less romantic but more interesting and exciting.”
