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 have a rapid-fire round of links to the university press world for you this week. First, continuing the theme of Black History Month, the Oxford University Press and Arthur Knight, Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary, celebrated the 90th birthday of Sidney Poitier, the pioneering African-American actor and cultural icon.

Film history was also on the docket of the University Press of Kentucky, which featured an excerpt from their new book Harry Langdon: King of Silent Comedy, by Gabriella Oldham and Mabel Langdon. The University of Texas focused on a smaller screen, posting an interview with author Stanley Corkin about his new book Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore.

As new challenges arose this week to immigration and deportation standards in the United States, Yuliya Komska, author of The Icon Curtain: The Cold War’s Quiet Border (2015), wondered what role ordinary citizens can play in ameliorating the harsh, often arbitrary dividing lines of international borders for the University of Chicago Press blog.

Continuing our recent theme of education on how the American government functions technically and legally, Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard University, wrote about “The Substance of the Constitution: Rights, Structures, and Conventions” for the Yale University Press.

At the Stanford University Press blog, author and novelist Bahiyyih Nakhjavani wrote a fascinating post on the “Language of Nowhere,” a phenomenon she sees as an essential feature of a fractured political world in which slips of the tongue become true and then false, and words “are a shifty lot, a bunch of two-faced turncoats that can say and gainsay in a single breath, swear and forswear, equate and equivocate.”

The University of North Carolina Press featured a guest post by Kristina Jacobsen, author of The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging (2017), about the incredibly creative and syncretic culture she sees at the Gallup (Na’nízhoozhí) flea market in Navaho Nation.

And finally, looking behind the curtain of the university press scene, the Island Press asked Where Are They Now? about the many interns they’ve had over the years. (Your neighborhood CUP intern wishes you all a fantastic weekend!)

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