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.)
A number of university press blogs this week discussed race in America across the centuries. The University of Washington Press shares an excerpt from Coll Thrush’s book Native Seattle, which looks at the historical and present-day survivance—survival/resistance—of Indigenous communities in Seattle. Over at Harvard Press, Katherine Benton-Cohen reflects on the centennial of the “Bisbee Deportation,” an illegal mass deportation of over a thousand striking mineworkers in Arizona, while Glenda M. Flores at the NYU Press blog talks about the efforts of Latina teachers in L.A. to protect children with undocumented parents. At the University of Michigan Press, Brian Matzke kicks off a series of posts on the context and legacy of the 1967 Detroit riot. Finally, Duke University Press gives us a reading list of articles on racial justice as part of its Read and Respond Series.
As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s birth and approach the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, we remember that both Thoreau and Austen wrote from within specific sociopolitical contexts—and that their lives and writings were more radical than they are often given credit for. Beacon Broadside has a post on Thoreau’s involvement with the abolition movement, and Harvard Press challenges us to take a page from Thoreau’s book by approaching modern environmental challenges with a sophisticated and intimate understanding of ecology. Looking across the pond (Atlantic, not Walden), Oxford University Press has a post on Elizabeth Bennet’s spirited defiance of class and gender hierarchies, and Johns Hopkins gives us a fascinating glimpse into the importance of manners, even during wartime, to Anglo-American relations in the early 19th century.
The Day of Action for Net Neutrality took place this week, and as the future of Internet access remains uncertain, several posts this week discussed the unique challenges and opportunities of sharing knowledge in digital form. At Penn Press, Jonathan Lazar and Michael Ashley Stein talk about the right of people with disabilities to access digital information. Over at Stanford Press, Nicole Coleman discusses the relationship between form and content on the Internet, as well as our changing perceptions of digitally-published scholarship.
From the grab-bag of the eye-catching and the odd: The University of Illinois Press gives us the story of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, a thoroughly American piece of music inspired by the transcendentalists, including our favorite 200-year-old birthday boy, Henry David Thoreau. At the Cornell Press blog, we learn about the wisdom of Hafez, a fourteenth-century Iranian poet whose collected works are used for divination. And at Oxford, Alan Mikhail writes about the perception of dogs in Islamic culture throughout the ages.
It’s getting to be prime vacation season here in New York, so we’ll conclude with this charming ode to the political and poetic possibilities of the humble postcard, over at Oxford University Press. Have a great week.
