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.)

Sandra M. Gustafson has been writing posts following the annual State of the Union address for the past few years at The Chicago Blog of the University of Chicago Press, and this year is no exception. In her most recent post, she looks at Barack Obama’s sixth SOTU address, arguing that “[m]ore and more, the president’s rhetoric and public actions inform an effort to shape his legacy, both in terms of the direction of his party and with regard to his historical reputation.”

At the University of California Press Blog, the spotlight is on Executive Editor Naomi Schneider, who answers questions about what she does as an editor, what it’s like editing Nobel Prize Winners, some of her favorite authors, and what it’s like to have her own imprint at the press. Her strategy: “clear your desk so you can think about your program in a more creative way and do higher-level strategizing about what to acquire.”

This week, the University Press of Mississippi blog is featuring a guest post from UPM Director Leila Salisbury. In her post, Salisbury looks back at the 2014 Charleston Conference, and discusses how libraries and university presses can most effectively (and amicably!) work together in the future.

What can France learn from American responses to casualties after the Charlie Hebdo attacks? At the JHU Press Blog, Zachary Shore examines various attacks on American soil or against American citizens throughout history, and argues that “[a]fter January 7th, the French may need some good old American moral outrage.”

In a guest post at the University of Nebraska Press Blog, R. Amy Elman asks, “what role, if any, does the EU have in mitigating discrimination in general and antisemitism in particular?” In particular, she looks at the EU’s response to the Charlie Hebdo attack and the supermarket killings that followed in declaring that there is a “pattern of indifference toward lethal antisemitism” in the EU’s behavior.

The Stanford University Press Blog is featuring an excerpt from Jessica Silbey’s The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property in which Silbey asks whether “the pecuniary gains of intellectual property” are what really drive innovation and invention.

At the OUPblog, moral philosopher Fiona Woollard thinks hard about whether her metaethical arguments might actually be immoral when they contradict those made by utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer in matters of our moral obligations to alleviate poverty by donating money to charity. In the end, though, she argues that “[t]he job of moral philosophers is to help people to decide what to believe about moral issues on the basis of reasoned reflection,” and philosophers can’t do so properly if they “shy away from attacking some arguments because it is good for people to believe them.”

Finally, we’ll wrap things up this week with a post from J. A. Mills at Beacon Broadside on the dangers of the good news on tiger populations coming out of India. Mills acknowledges that the news that wild tiger populations in India might be up by as much as 30%, she cautions that this type of good news often can lead to the belief that tigers are out of danger of extinction. That, she argues emphatically, is still very much not the case.

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