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.)

Topicality has been the order of the day for many university press blogs this week. ‘Fake news’ was unpacked at the Oxford University Press blog by historian and researcher James W. Cortada, who traces the path of false information in American politics and life all the way back to 1796, and follows it through scandals to do with President Andrew Jackson, the manufacture and advertising of cigarettes, and Facebook. The Stanford University Press also addressed historical precedents for current affairs with a post by Jeffrey Dudas, recently the author of Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism, tracing the paternalism of American politics from Jackson to Trump.

Other posts of current interest included one by Kevin W. Saunders at the Cambridge University Press blog, who unpacks evidence that, according to various metrics, the United States “is no longer a fully functioning democracy.” At the University of California Press blog, CUNY’s Amy Adamczyk pulled together a fascinating series of data to explore the various financial, political, and religious factors which seem to affect any given country’s public attitudes towards homosexuality. And the Johns Hopkins University Press celebrated two of its journals whose work has particular relevance to Women’s History Month.

From the grab-bag of the eye-catching and the odd: as Americans around the country shifted their clocks to Daylight Savings Time, the Harvard University Press featured an excerpt of Charles W. J. Wither’s book Zero Degrees: Geographers of the Prime Meridian (2017), which answers questions about how and why the prime meridian was set at Greenwich, in the United Kingdom, instead of anywhere else in the world. And the University of Chicago featured part of an Atlantic review of their author Simon Goldhill’s fascinating new book A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain, about a prominent family replete with intrigue and what was then considered sexual deviancy.

And in bricks-and-mortar press news, the Fordham University Press this week described their move to new offices in Manhattan. And if you’re looking for a potential internship, the University of Georgia Press and the University Press of Mississippi are both accepting applications!