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.)
We’ll start things off this week with a post at the JHU Press Blog written by Keith Brock of the John’s Hopkins University Press staff. Brock discusses the JHUP Diversity Committee, and tells the story of how he helped to create it. Some of the work that the JHUP Diversity Committee does: “I can proudly say that we have started our process through volunteer activities, community collaborations (both internal and external), diversity training, creating mission statements, and increasing awareness.”
Professor Juan Flores, a well-known and widely respected scholar of Puerto Rican identity and culture, passed away in late 2014. At the UNC Press Blog, Christina D. Abreu honors Flores and discusses the ongoing importance of his work in a guest post.
Stanford University Press is launching a “novel publishing initiative for scholars in the digital humanities and computational social sciences” with grant funding from the Mellon Foundation. This week, the SUP blog is hosting a series of posts on what it means to publish digital scholarship, with articles explaining the new program, explaining their reasoning behind the move to a new publishing paradigm, and explaining how the new digital-born scholarship will aid researchers.
The attack on the Charlie Hebdo office has prompted a wide range of responses, and several scholarly publishing blogs have posted interesting takes on the situation. At fifteeneightyfour, the blog of Cambridge University Press, Ritu Gairola Khanduri looks at the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons through the lens of her work on similarly provocative cartoons in India, with a focus on how “[c]artoons show us that politics is sensory.” At the OUPblog, Christopher Hill argues that these attacks mark the end of the “French exception,” a term describing the relative freedom from terrorist attack that France has enjoyed over the past fifteen years, particularly in comparison to European neighbors like Spain and Britain. And at Beacon Broadside, Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski worry that “the reaction to these tragic killings seamlessly moves forward within an easily manipulated narrative. This story is compellingly shaped by the twin themes of terrorism and destruction of freedom of speech. Because this narrative is framed by the politics of fear, resentment, and vengeance, it has become as volatile and potentially incendiary as the actions that produced it.”
As excitement about the apparently rapidly approaching “internet of things” (“Stoves and baby bottles will soon be smart, and the devices you already have will be smarter”) continues to grow, the importance of access to the web is becoming more obvious. At Yale Books Unbound, Philip N. Howard makes the case that the internet should be a public resource.
At the University of Nebraska Press Blog, Marilyn S. Greenwald tells the story of Pauline Frederick, the pioneering United Nations correspondent for NBC in the 1940s and 1950s who was the only woman to report the “hard news” for a major broadcaster for much of her career.
“Our nation’s stories are full of absences.” Roger Aden, writing at North Philly Notes, the blog of Temple University Press, discusses the interesting fact that when we tell stories of the past, we treasure both surviving historical artifacts and “the stories, memories, and events which remain meaningful to us even if we have few, if any, physical reminders of them.”
As Emily Monosson claims at Island Press Field Notes, “Grizzly bears, Ursus arctos horribilis, are the wild that we both crave and fear. They are awesome and terrifying, and they exist at our mercy.” In her post, Monosson describes how bears are studied in the wild, how global warming is affecting bear populations, and what scientists are trying to do to see into the future of the grizzly bear.
The ancestral cemeteries of Kyrgyzstan’s more remote regions are beautiful, ornate, and full of buildings and monuments that resemble cities. The University of Washington Press Blog has collected some of Margaret Morton’s photographic studies of these cemeteries into a fascinating post.
Peter Blume is not one of the best known painters of the twentieth century, but, as Robert Cozzolino argues in a Q&A at The Penn Press Log, “Blume was central to the development and reception of modernism in the United States.” Cozzolino hopes that projects like the Peter Blume retrospective he is curating will help to revive interest in the Russian American artist.
Cooking for picky children can be a challenge. Luckily, Anne K. Fishel has a helpful list of advice for cooking for kids of various ages up at AMACOM Books Blog. For instance, she advises that one shouldn’t “underestimate your toddler’s taste buds. The idea that young children and adults must eat different foods might be a myth created by food manufacturers and marketers.”
Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post by Tim Darnell at the University of Georgia Press blog. Inspired by the recent election of John Smoltz into the National Baseball Hall of Fame (the third Atlanta Braves pitcher from the 1990s to be inducted after Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine), Darnell looks back at some of the earliest Atlanta baseball stars to be inducted in the baseball HOF.
Thanks for reading! As always, we hope that you enjoyed the links. Please let us know what you think in the comments!
