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.

Halloween is over and done with for another year, but we here at the Columbia UP blog aren’t quite ready to let it go yet, so we’ll start off this Roundup with a quick selection of Halloween-themed posts from the OUPblog and fifteeneightyfour, the blog of Cambridge University Press. First of all, get back into the Halloween spirit with a spooky Halloween playlist, courtesy of the staff at Oxford University Press. Once you are good and scared, it’s time to learn more about famous Halloween icons: ghosts and witches. Why do we love ghosts? At fifteeneightyfour, Martin Bridgstock attempts to explain our fascination with ghost stories, while at the OUPblog, Roger Luckhurst looks back at the history of the Victorian-era “Ghost Club.” The standard medieval text for identifying and dealing with witches was the Malleus Maleficarum, and at fifteeneightyfour, Christopher Mackay has a post on studying The Hammer of Witches today. Finally, at the OUPblog, Owen Davies explains why Halloween is so associated with witches.

And now, on to the non-Halloween posts.

Beacon Broadside has a post up of Carole Joffe’s remarks upon “accepting the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Family Planning” on October 7. She discusses the “social status” of abortion providers, and in particular how the status of many providers has changed from the time of Roe v. Wade.

The severe damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy on the NYC subway system revealed the difficulties faced by the MTA in attempting to keep water out of the subway tunnels in the case of large storms. Fordham Impressions, the blog of Fordham University Press, has an interesting post up about the problems caused by Sandy and the future of preventing flooding in the subway.

Many cities throughout the United States are listening to transportation reform advocates and redesigning streets and intersections to be more effective and better for the environment. In a detailed post, Island Press Field Notes, the blog of Island Press, describes some of the forward-thinking projects taking place across the country, from Nashville to Detroit to Portland, Maine.

The University of Nebraska Press blog has a couple of great posts up this week. First, UNP Marketing Manager Martyn Beeny discusses his experiences working at a university press: “University presses publish books within a university setting, affording us unique opportunities, partly because there are not many university presses. This rarity should remind those of us who work in the field to appreciate what we have and to take advantage of the curricular and the noncurricular activities in the academe and its related environment.” Then, in an article originally from the journal Against the Current, John R. Salter, Jr. looks back at his relationship with and memories of Medgar Evers.

Tuesday, October 29th, was the eightieth anniversary of a two-day meeting of the NAACP in Raleigh meant to increase the NAACP’s membership and to address racial inequalities in North Carolina, particularly in the pay of teachers. At the UNC Press blog, Sarah Thuesen discusses the long history of the NAACP in North Carolina, and how it is still fighting some of the same battles today, eighty years after the 1933 meeting.

“In the aftermath of DOMA’s overturning and state after state legalizing same sex unions, there have been a flurry of articles to suggest the wedding industry has struck gold with the impending rush of gay and lesbian weddings.” However, at From the Square, the blog of NYU Press, Karen M. Dunak argues that the assumption that gay and lesbian couples will all begin to marry is mistaken, and doesn’t account for the complexity and variety of the people in question.

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post by Abby Phillips Metzger at the OSU Press blog in which she discusses the damage that we are doing to our rivers, and the effects, both ecological and social, that this damage will cause. In particular, she discuses the blasting away of over ninety miles of snags and bends in the Willamette River to make gravel.

Thanks again for reading this week’s roundup! Have a great weekend, and leave any thoughts in the comments!