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.)

This week started off with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so it’s only fitting that this week’s University Press Roundup should start with posts from a number of blogs in honor of the occasion. First of all, at the Florida Bookshelf, the blog of the University Press of Florida, W. Jason Miller explains how the poetry of Langston Hughes inspired Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermons. Jennifer J. Yanco, writing at the Indiana University Press blog, looks at the recently released film Selma, and wonders whether the movie could be a turning point in how people see Dr. King, while Hasan Kwame Jeffries looks at the actual events of Selma in 1965 at From the Square, the blog of NYU Press. Finally, at the SUP blog, Vincent J. Intondi uncovers a less frequently discussed aspect of Dr. King’s politics: his stance against the use and creation of nuclear weapons.

At the University of Washington Press Blog, Laura Kina discusses “the emerging discipline of mixed race studies,” how it has been affected by recent racially charged events (particularly those at Ferguson), and what it can offer to the public dialogues about race in America.

“In the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks, the Islamophobia pervading Western democracies is the best recruitment tool for violent extremists.” Writing at the OUPblog, Justin Gest makes the case that violent and/or oppressive backlash against Muslims in Western countries following terrorist attacks (France is the most recent example), is a major part of the plan for Islamic extremists who are behind such attacks. Meanwhile, at fifteeneightyfour, the blog of Cambridge University Press, Emile Chabal asks whether crises like the Charlie Hebdo attack actually serve to unite France, rather than divide it.

Thursday was the 42nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, and in honor of the occasion, the Harvard University Press Blog is featuring an adapted excerpt from the Foreword to Mary Ziegler’s After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate. Ziegler argues that “by paying attention so exclusively to the Supreme Court we have lost a much richer story about the evolution of abortion politics.”

This week, the Penn Press Log introduced an exciting new addition to the academic publishing blogosphere: the JHIBlog of the Journal of the History of Ideas. They also featured the first JHIBlog post, which explains what the new blog hopes to accomplish.

The University of Nebraska Press Blog featured a new post in the Doc Martyn’s Soul series of Marketing Manager Martyn Beeny this week. This time around, Beeny looks at the fine art of writing marketing copy for books: the “words used to describe the many more words contained within the pages of a book should tease, entice, intrigue, captivate; they should make you want to know more about the book—by buying it and reading it.”

Discussions of the politics behind video game development and behind the way that the public reacts to games have been prevalent over the past few months, and at the University of Minnesota Press Blog, Adrienne Shaw explains why there is a need for more diversity in games, but also argues that “game content alone will not ameliorate the representational issues in video games or lure new people into game culture. Rather, people need to be in a position where they feel the right to demand representation from games.”

Ever wonder how conservationists and ecologists are using the many new technologies at their disposal to change the way we understand different ecosystems? At Island Press Field Notes, Joe Landsberg has a fascinating guest post about new techniques of modelling forests that are primarily concerned with “determining the amount of material in them – their biomass – and their growth rates.”

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post from Rob DeSalle and Susan L. Perkins at Yale Books Unbound on recent developments in the science of antibiotics. The rise of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria has been worrying for some time, now: the “diminishing returns problem.” DeSalle and Perkins have good news, though. They explain that researchers have isolated a new, more powerful antimicrobial agent, teixobactin. As welcome as this news may be, however, they warn that this hasn’t solved the diminishing returns problem, merely potentially delayed some of its negative effects.

Thanks for reading! As always, we hope that you enjoyed the links. Please let us know what you think in the comments!