Review of Katie King, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell, Durham: Duke UP, 2011.

Rob Wilkie, The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, New York: Fordham UP, 2011.

Over the past year, faculty members in my interdisciplinary department at Georgia Tech responded to the request by an external review for improved descriptions of our programs and department. The process of strategic planning is inherited from the corporate world and is the most obvious way that academic institutions are being pressed to function better (i.e., more like corporations). My colleagues and I struggled to agree on the best description of our research and teaching, because we knew that the reputation and future configuration of the department were at stake. Recessionary university budgets meant that we had to be both accurate and persuasive in descriptions that would be read by various interest groups: our university colleagues; administrators, including our dean, provost, and president; former, current, and prospective students and their parents; employers of our graduates; the citizens and legislators of our state who underwrite part of the budget for our institution; and the various other funding agencies and donors who contribute to our research and curricular programs.

After considering what each faculty member does and relating it to the university’s recently issued strategic plan, we reached a consensus that our scholarship and curricular programs focus on culture and technology, and particularly on building and critiquing technologies, including technologies of representation. While agreeing on our core activities, however, we also recognized diverse affiliations with other disciplinary and interdisciplinary humanistic fields: rhetoric, literary criticism, creative writing, cinema studies, performance studies, and cultural studies of science and technology. Because it is impossible to be both universally transparent and cutting-edge, there are irresolvable, permanent tensions between our department’s general project and individual faculty members’ specific research; these tensions are reflected, furthermore, in the differences between our department’s configuration and those of similar departments in the state system and beyond.

Our experience of strategic planning represents what Katie King calls “networked reenactment” in building community-identity and embodies what Rob Wilkie describes as the necessary, if unpaid, labor to create culture. King’s and Wilkie’s respective books, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell and The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, both consider the economic forces affecting the creation, deployment, and consumption of technologies and related representations. Both books explain how macroeconomic processes affect scholarly work and undervalue it in the marketplace. Theoretically rigorous, these books are also highly pragmatic in recommending activism for social justice. Read more

Carol Colatrella
Georgia Institute of Technology
carol.colatrella@lcc.gatech.edu

New York University
NYU Silver Center
Jurow Hall, 1st floor
100 Washington Square East
NYC

May 4-5,  9:30am-7:30pm

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Conference sponsored by Fordham University’s Comparative Literature Program, New York University’s Comparative Literature Department, Fordham University Press and the consortium of presses participating in the Modern Language Initiative. Funding generously provided by the Mellon-funded Modern Language Initiative and Fordham University Arts & Sciences Deans.

For information, visit www.modernlanguageinitiative.com

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) posted Fred’s recap of the event on the AAUP blog, The Digital Digest:

Is Academic Publishing in a Downward Zombie Death Spiral?

When I was invited to the panel “Protests, Petitions and Publishing: Widening Access to Research in 2012,” I was on the fence about attending. Did I really want to spend two hours of my day hearing the debate on open access, anticipating that it would be filled with much controversy? Because it was close and I was confident that I would learn something, I made the short trek earlier this week from the Bronx to Morningside Heights, even scoring a parking spot in front of the Columbia building housing the event on a day on which alternate-side-of-the-street parking was in effect. The press release indicated that the event was meant to consider how Occupy Wall Street, the Research Works Act (RWA), the boycott of Elsevier journals by a growing number of academics, and other recent developments are informing the debate over access to research and scholarship on open access. The event was hosted by Columbia’s Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) and included a diverse panel of speakers. I’ll do my best to summarize the session based on my notes drafted the old school way on a notepad in barely legible handwriting. (This exercise made me realize that I need to embrace the iPad more.) The audio will be available shortly, so I will post a link on the Digital Digest when it is. The issues are complicated, and there are no easy answers as was evident by the talk on Monday. Alex Golub from the University of Hawaii called current publishing models a death spiral. As most of us know, the hard sciences are very different from the humanities. The AAUP made an official statement about three pieces of legislation related to research policies that have resulted in a flurry of mixed responses from university press directors. READ MORE

LOADED WORDS
By Marjorie Garber
304 pages
9780823242054, paperback, $26.00
Pub date: June 1, 2012

A vigorous, revealing collection about the pleasures and revelations of close reading, whether it involves words, books, biographies or ideas.

Renowned scholar Garber (English/Harvard Univ.; The Use and Abuse of Literature, 2011, etc.) is a deep thinker who never has to look far for inspiration—life and literature are full of untapped mysteries, and the more you slow down, the more you see. She finds large-scale drama in the small, abstract or arcane, reveling in how ordinary words keep secrets, how exclusive words (like genius) become clichés, how a rare edition of Hamlet can conceal hidden agendas and how historic figures become advertising “brands.” An essay on the word mad forges a credible connection between Mad magazine, the TV show Mad Men, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and that original mad man, Hamlet. Shakespeare recurs throughout the book; as she demonstrated in her massive guidebook Shakespeare After All (2004), he’s the lens through which Garber often sees the world. The same goes for the great critic F.O. Matthiessen, recalled here in a superb tribute focusing on how his background in Elizabethan studies prepared him to understand 19th-century American literature. The use of the phrase “honey trap” in newspaper accounts of Julian Assange’s rape trial leads to Winnie the Pooh and the possible anti-German bias of “hunny.” Tackling Coleridge’s “unfinished” poem “Kubla Khan,” Garber raises questions as to what it means for a work of art to be cut short. In a final essay, the author offers a stirring defense of the humanities as the division of the university that deliberately doesn’t solve problems; it wrestles with interpretations, not final answers.

The same goes for this intellectually generous and rewarding book. Like its many subjects, it repays the close attention it commands. —KIRKUS REVIEWS

By Helen Tartar, February 10, 2012

Photo by Bruce Gilbert

To give you my practical advice on getting published, I can direct you to a piece entitled “Writing a Book Proposal and Choosing a Publisher”. Or Google “helen tartar editor,” go into the Fordham ImPressions archive, and click on “Read More.” Therefore, my remarks here will be more general. When I asked Julia Rosenbaum for advice, she suggested that I talk about “Where is publishing going?” And so I will, though, as I told her, the answer to that can be quickly said.

I do not know, and I cannot know for sure, where publishing is going. To which I would add: if you meet someone who says she does know, don’t trust her—she is probably either trying to sell you something or under the sway of someone who’s trying to sell her something.

In a very mundane and specific way, I do something every day to contribute to where publishing is going. As an acquiring editor at a small university press, I orchestrate decisions about what gets published at the publishing house where I am employed, and I do what I can to help influence how those books are offered to the public. Because those decisions are sometimes tough and painful, it’s very important for me to remember that I do not know where publishing is going—that in fact I have to learn this from the people who come to me seeking to get published. Because the future of publishing lies in the books that people write.

One can, of course, know only two things about the future: first, that one cannot know with certainty what it will be; and second, that one cannot help wanting to do so. In China, writing was born entwined with the hope of divining the future, through the cracks in turtle shells. At our late date, we tend to think of writing as the source of history— despite Plato’s early warning that it is memory’s foe. But maybe part of the disquiet behind the question “Where is publishing going?” reflects some unsettled temporality latent in writing itself. READ MORE

The winner of the 2009-2010 competition is Neni Panourgiá for Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State, Fordham University Press.

The Edmund Keeley Book Prize is awarded to an academic book dealing with modern Greece or a Hellenic theme published originally in the English language.

For more information click here.

“Dangerous Citizens is a simultaneous indictment of the “liberal” nation-state’s blithe pretensions and willful self-ignorance; of the political and discursive relegation of modern Greek history to the historical margins of the colonial “civilizing mission”; and of inhuman simplifications of the past everywhere. In an evocation of Oedipus that owes nothing to crass invocations of continuity with the ancient world, Neni Panourgiá writes with the ethical passion of a partial witness who nonetheless claims no special privilege other than that of the common humanity denied by the state to those it repeatedly configures as its enemies. In posing this appealingly controversial challenge to the liberal self-imagination, moreover, Panourgiá–who has honed her distinctive writing idiom into a compelling mix of careful scholarship and stylistic adventurism–calls anthropology itself to account.”–Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

“Dangerous Citizens is a powerful and unforgettable book. It is at once a horrific history of nearly a century of state violence in Greece that few people may be aware of; a profound meditation on the conditions of possibility for both the idea and the reality of concentration camps; and a text that intertwines ethnography, history, and personal memoir to very powerful effect.”–Sherry Ortner, University of California, Los Angeles

Dangerous Citizens also won Honorable Mention for the 2009 Prose Awards in Archeology & Anthropology.

Buy this book

To read more about Neni Panourgiá and Dangerous Citizens: Click here.

“University Press Scholarship Online represents a convenient, dynamic step forward for ensuring that scholarly content from many venerable presses across the globe is conveniently searchable and accessible via one platform to the academic community worldwide,” notes Tim Barton, Managing Director of Global Academic Publishing for Oxford University Press.

Responding to increased demand for online scholarly content, UPSO streamlines the research process by making disparately published monographs easily accessible, highly discoverable and fully cross-searchable via one online platform. Research that previously would have required users to jump between a variety of books, and disconnected websites can now be concentrated through a single search engine.

First phase of content from participating partner presses include Fordham University Press (Fordham Scholarship Online/FSO); The American University in Cairo Press (Cairo Scholarship Online/CSO); The University Press of Kentucky (Kentucky Scholarship Online/KSO); University Press of Florida (Florida Scholarship Online/FLASO); Hong Kong University Press (Hong Kong Scholarship Online/HKSO); Additional presses are signing up to participate and OUP expects to add their content to UPSO in March 2012. Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh Scholarship Online/ESO) and Policy Press (Policy Press Scholarship Online/PPSO) are just two additional presses slated for the March 2012 update.

UPSO’s mission is to create an individually-branded home for monographs from each participating university press just as it has done for Oxford Scholarship Online while allowing highly intuitive tools to deep search across all the content in the program. As such, UPSO will be the premier online research tool—for scholars, teachers, graduate and undergraduate students—and an essential resource for all academic libraries.

Oxford Scholarship Online was launched in 2003 and immediately hailed as “A superior e-book implementation” by Booklist, and “For ease of use, user-friendly design, and quality texts, Oxford Scholarship Online is among the best I have ever used” by Library Journal.

Benefits of UPSO for academics, libraries, and partner presses:

• Provides the highest quality scholarly content across 24 subject areas

• Includes a vast and growing number of titles 5,485 titles will be available at launch, 652 of which are new titles, with abstracts and keywords at both the book and chapter level for each title

• All UPSO content is available in XML, which provides deep tagging and better search results. Content can also be saved downloaded to PDF

• Is fully cross-referenced and cross-searchable, with clickable citations from bibliographies and footnotes, including OpenURL and DOI-linking support

• Allows users to streamline research through a single online platform

• Can be easily integrated into library systems and updated frequently with new content

• Offers full customer support services as well as flexibility and choice in purchasing models

• Mobile functionality will be available later this year

• Increase discoverability and usage of university press scholarly materials

• Offers university presses unique opportunity to create an XML digital workflow and join a highly successful online scholarship platform, reaching the global academic market at low distribution costs

“OUP has developed this innovative and highly successful service specifically to address digital monographs. We’re the only publisher with a decade of this digital experience under our belt with more than 60% of research libraries now offering their users access to Oxford Scholarship Online,” said Casper Grathwohl, VP, Digital Publisher at Oxford University Press. “The UPSO program builds on this experience by opening the environment to the university press community—a welcome expansion for librarians and users who understand the growing power provided by a post-PDF research solution.”

“I think the timing is right for the UPSO model—over the past year the university press community has delved more deeply into strategic conversations about how to address their digital monograph publishing and we hope that the UPSO program will offer them a solution with a proven track record in an environment that is more flexible than most other offerings that are becoming available. UPSO is ultimately about unlocking the power of the academic monograph, and that singular focus makes it incredibly compelling,” concluded Grathwohl.

“Fordham University Press is delighted to be able to offer libraries electronic access to its books through Oxford’s UPSO service. We are fortunate to be associated with such a well-respected and proven platform that offers our content in XML as part of a dynamic search database. It clearly meets the needs and anticipates future needs of libraries and patrons,” states Fredric Nachbaur, Director of Fordham University Press

About OSO
Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) launched in the Fall of 2003. By every measure (usage, critical acclaim, availability), OSO has been a success. Long established and comfortably ensconced with hundreds of participating universities, Oxford Scholarship Online has continued to grow in terms of both content and users. The further development to Oxford Scholarship Online in 2011 has been developed in direct response to user demands and feedback. This ensures that it remains at the cutting edge of scholarship and sits perfectly within the platform of UPSO. The new improvements, arriving with the launch of UPSO, include a brand new look and feel based on user feedback, personalization features and improved search and browse options.

For more information regarding FSO, please contact
Kate O’Brien-Nicholson, Marketing Director,
at bkaobrien@fordham.edu
or 718.817.4782

What participating partner presses are saying about UPSO:

The unprecedented speed of change in the electronic publishing environment presents both challenges and significant opportunities for publishers. We are delighted to be working with Oxford University Press and specifically with University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO). They have a great deal of experience of working with a global network of academic institutions, libraries and scholars. This presence will enable Edinburgh to continue to innovate in how we sell our books and journals using a single online platform whilst maintaining our individual branding.
-Timothy E Wright, Chief Executive, Edinburgh University Press Ltd.

University Press of Florida is delighted to be among the first presses to join University Press Scholarship Online. In today’s constantly changing environment, we know how important it is to work hand-in-glove with academic libraries to make the most up-to-date and rigorously vetted content available to as wide an audience as possible. Through UPSO and its enhanced searchability functions, we anticipate both an increased readership—especially of portions of books—and a resulting improvement in future scholarship.
– Dennis Lloyd, Associate Director/Director of Sales and Marketing, University Press of Florida

The University Press of Kentucky is thrilled about its inclusion as part of the University Press Scholarship Online program. As one of the leaders in the academic community, Oxford is known for being one of the top providers of electronic and print content. With XML tagging and dynamic searchable information, UPSO is clearly a paragon of the digital publishing age.
– John P. Hussey, Director of Marketing & Sales, University Press of Kentucky

For access to UPSO and more information re partner presses, pricing, functionality and additional updates regarding this project please contact Purdy, Director of Publicity, at christian.purdy@oup.com or 212.726.6032

Rising tuition fees, falling endowments, an exodus of undergraduate students to pre-professional majors, and a spate of recent books critical of the liberal arts professoriate — such developments have raised questions about the value of the humanities as taught in U.S. universities. Cost-conscious institutions have responded by cutting budgets and tenure-track positions in core humanities departments. In this lively, debate-style forum, three distinguished academic guests addressed the current crisis — if indeed it is a crisis — from very different points of view. Ohio State’s Frank J. Donoghue, Pomona College’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Bob Stein, specifically considered the role of university press publishing in the future of the humanities, and the role of the humanities in the future of the university press. Will either survive the 21st century and if so, as Shakespeare might have asked, how will it?

AAUP 2011: Debating the Humanities