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.)
Several university presses celebrated intriguing anniversaries this week. Duke University Press pulled together a list of essential reading from Transgender Studies Quarterly in honor of the ninth annual International Transgender Day of Visibility. The University of California Press has honored the civil and labor rights activist Cesar Chavez with a reading list of his life and times, on what would have been his 90th birthday. The University Press of Kentucky compiled a list of several of their military history titles to accompany the 84th annual meeting of the Society for Military History this weekend. And the Beacon Broadside Press looked back at their decision to edit and publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, featuring quotes from the then-director of the Press, Gobin Stair.
Our big current affairs post of the week comes from the Oxford University Press blog, where Michael Keating, Professor of Politics at the University of Aberdeen, unpacked the issues at stake in the Scottish National Party’s decision to go ahead with seeking a second referendum on leaving the United Kingdom, reacting to the future uncertainty of ‘Brexit’ for Scotland and the British Isles as a whole. Elsewhere, the Stanford University Press blog featured a post by Julian Berkshaw and Jonas Ridderstrale, co-authors of Fast/Forward: Make Your Company Fit for the Future (2017), on the increasing pitfalls of using big data in the business world and what they believe will be a necessary move back towards human decision making in the world of management.
The University of Pennsylvania Press blog featured a post from Columbia’s own Professor Richard John looking at the various ways in which historians have tackled the relationship between politics and the business world in the United States. And at the University of North Carolina Press blog, Jennifer Le Zotte, author of From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies (2017), contributed a fascinating guest post on the importance of thrift stores to the development of LGBTQ cultures, and how they “permanently altered the dynamics between charity, labor, activism, and profit.”
From the grab-bag of the eye-catching and the odd: at the NYU Press blog, Margaret M. McGuinness wrote on the necessity of including “trailblazing nuns” and other women religious in histories of labor and business. Temple University Press featured a piece by Lolly Tai on the importance and beauty of the best outdoor environments designed for children. At the Yale University Press blog, Timothy Bolton reflected on the biography of King Cnut, and on the challenges of writing a biography of him given that “the image of the man behind the acts as reported in the various sources of evidence often seems like the reports of the three legendary blindmen describing their elephant.” And finally: the Yale University Press continued its series ‘Bird Fact Friday’ by asking the question – why do birds sing?