Harvard University Press Blog

2011 National Humanities Medalists

We are very pleased to share the news that a number of authors whom we’ve been honored to publish over the years have been named recipients of the 2011 National Humanities Medal. The medals will be awarded by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House this afternoon, which will be streamed live at 1:45 ET. The medals, given since 1997, honor “individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.”

One 2011 recipient with whom we’ve had a long relationship is Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, author most recently of The Idea of Justice. The NEH has produced short bios of each recipient, and their coverage of Sen explains away the potential incongruity of seeing an economist awarded a medal for work in the humanities:

When Amartya Sen recounts his intellectual biography, he likes to emphasize different strands of his thought rather than present a unified narrative. “It has been clear from my childhood that I have a lot of curiosity,” he explains, “and unfortunately, or fortunately, it has not been limited to one subject.” This momentary indecision, this uncertainty about considering his diverse interests as good or bad luck, represents the glory and the paradox of his career… Sen’s early work focused on economics, but the social sciences and the humanities are not discontinuous for him. “I don’t really find the division between the subjects contrary to human understanding,” he says, “but if someone were to say to me, you’re an economist and you can’t study philosophy, that would be contrary to how the human mind works.” In the past three decades, he has written on violence, peace, development, equality, and cultural identity—a true marriage of economics and the humanities.

Also receiving the medal this year is the pianist and critic Charles Rosen, whose fourth HUP book will be published this spring. The book, a collection entitled Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature, contains Rosen’s ruminations on everything and everyone from Mozart to melancholy, Adorno to opera, and the canon to California. From the NEH bio:

Charles Rosen, one of America’s great writers on music, began his writing career almost as an afterthought. In 1951, the year he turned twenty-four, Rosen earned his PhD in French literature from Princeton, made his New York performing debut, and recorded his first album. The native New Yorker quickly became one of America’s most renowned classical pianists, playing in recitals and as a soloist in orchestra concerts around the world. His career blossomed so rapidly that, by 1955, Rosen was able to leave his academic position teaching French at MIT after only two years, although he’s held many distinguished temporary academic positions since, including at Harvard, Oxford, and Chicago universities… Rosen’s career as one the country’s preeminent classical performers triggered his parallel vocation as a writer about music. He had shunned the subject while in college, where he majored in French literature. “I was too proud to take courses in music,” he recalls. “I don’t mean to sound snotty, but it’s true: I knew more about music than most of the music graduate students,” having studied piano since he was four years old and read much on his own. Unimpressed by the sleeve notes for one of his 1960 recordings, Rosen decided henceforth to write his own.

Andrew Delbanco is another medal recipient with an HUP book arriving this spring: The Abolitionist Imagination, which presents essays intended to give readers a sense of what it meant to be a thoughtful citizen in nineteenth-century America, appalled by slavery yet aware of the fragility of the republic and the high cost of radical action. This volume follows several other works of Delbanco’s that we’ve published, going all the way back to 1981. The NEH describes Delbanco as “the definition of a public intellectual,” and notes his “combination of deep learning, eloquence, and a deft, original way of considering our national history and literature.”

Robert Darnton, whose 2010 book Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris represents only the most recent product of a long relationship with HUP, receives this medal in the midst of his rise to prominence as a driving force behind the creation of the Digital Public Library of America. He is being awarded the medal for his “determination to make knowledge accessible to everyone,” and, as the NEH notes, he is also known for helping to create the discipline of the history of the book:

“The basic idea is not to just assume that a book is a vehicle of ideas, but to understand how it’s a force in history,” Darnton explains. “To ask how is it produced, how is it diffused, how deeply did it penetrate into society, and then—this is tough—how was it read? What was its effect? Looking at the printed word makes you reassess some classical questions—in my case, questions about the origins of the French Revolution.”

And, finally, we’re pleased to note that Kwame Anthony Appiah is also among this year’s recipients. We had the pleasure of working with Appiah when we published his Mary Flexner Lectures in 2007 as Experiments in Ethics. The collection, noted for being clear, accessible, and funny, explored how the new scientifically-enabled research on empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics. Appiah also delivered the 2010 W.E.B. Du Bois lectures, which we are slated to publish in expanded form in the near future. He receives the National Humanities Medal for “seeking eternal truths in the contemporary world” and for producing a body of work that sheds “moral and intellectual light on the individual in an era of globalization and evolving group identities.”

Our sincere congratulations to Sen, Rosen, Delbanco, Darnton, and Appiah, as well as to their co-recipients John Ashberry, Teofilo Ruiz, Ramón Saldívar, and National History Day.

Feather-Capped and Back-Patted

We’ve begun this year with a number of nice honors for books we published in the last. Seems that 2011 was a particularly nice year for HUP biographies. One of them, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, has been shortlisted for the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, which celebrates the best in non-fiction writing. The winner will be announced at a party given at the French Embassy in London on Wednesday, February 29th. This welcome accolade joins many others for Douglas-Fairhurst’s unconventional look at Dickens, which was recognized as a favorite of 2011 by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Telegraph.

We’re also proud to see another biography, Ezra F. Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, earning wide praise. Having already been named a highlight of 2011 by The Economist, Washington Post, and others, Vogel’s masterful look at China’s boldest strategist has also been named a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography. In what was an exceptional year for the category, Vogel’s book keeps great company among co-Finalists such as Manning Marable’s Malcolm X and John Lewis Gaddis’s take on George F. Kennan.

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China has also been longlisted for the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize, which celebrates the best non-fiction book on foreign affairs published in English. And joining Vogel on the Gelber longlist is Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Origins of the First World War, which boldly upends the conventional understanding of Russia’s part in the Great War. The Gelber list will be shortened in early February, and the winner of the $15,000 Prize will be announced on March 12th.

We’re also honored to note that Daniel Blatman’s The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide was named Co-Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, for which 2011 was the inaugural year. The Book Prize Committee praised The Death Marches as “an important, path breaking new study on a well-known yet largely unstudied part of the Holocaust,” and described the book as “masterly, a veritable tour de force, and truly a pioneering study and an example of outstanding scholarship.”

And we’d also like to note the awarding of the American Historical Association’s 2011 George Louis Beer Prize to David Ciarlo, for Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. The award, given in recognition of outstanding historical writing on any phase of European international history since 1895, is open to any scholar who is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Ciarlo recently discussed his innovative visual history of the German colonial worldview with the folks at New Books in History, where you can listen to the conversation.

On our website, you can scroll through other recent awards for HUP books, and we’ve also collected the Book of the Year citations given to over two dozen HUP works released in 2011. We’re continually honored to be working with such talented scholars, and we’re very proud to see their wonderful work recognized so widely.

Thomas Sargent Shares 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics

Our congratulations to Thomas J. Sargent, who shares this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics with Christopher A. Sims for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy. In 1987 we published Sargent’s Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory, along with its companion volume, Exercises in Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory, which was written with Rodolfo E. Manuelli. Our Lindsay Waters, who acquired those books for HUP, had previously published both Sargent and Sims while at the University of Minnesota Press.

The Nobel press release describes Sargent’s work:

Thomas Sargent has shown how structural macroeconometrics can be used to analyze permanent changes in economic policy. This method can be applied to study macroeconomic relationships when households and firms adjust their expectations concurrently with economic developments. Sargent has examined, for instance, the post-World War II era, when many countries initially tended to implement a high-inflation policy, but eventually introduced systematic changes in economic policy and reverted to a lower inflation rate.

And, further explanation via the Nobel website:

What happens in the macroeconomy when monetary policy systematically follows a Taylor rule, i.e., when the interest rate responds to changes in inflation and the business cycle in a pre-determined pattern? Or what happens if a central bank is instead given a mandate to maintain inflation close to two percent? Sargent’s analysis deals with the effects of such systematic policy rules and the consequences of changes in the rules for policy. Expectations are an integral part of this analytical approach.

Is it possible to determine whether changes in the economy depend on shifts in economic policy? Could such changes instead depend on fluctuations in the overall economy that prompt decision-makers to adopt a different policy? Sargent has examined these issues using a three-step method.

His first step involves developing a structural macroeconomic model, i.e., an accurate mathematical description of the economy. A number of parameters, which determine the relationships among different variables, are introduced into the model. For instance, if we know that consumers’ aggregate demand for goods and services is affected by the expected real interest rate, this relationship should be incorporated in the model. The parameters governing such basic relations should not be affected by the changes in economic policy. This includes preference parameters, which describe how individuals choose between saving and consumption depending on interest rates and income.

Mark McGurl Awarded 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

We’re excited to share the news that UCLA English Professor Mark McGurl has been awarded the 2011 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for his 2009 HUP book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. The $30,000 award—the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism—is administered for the Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Past winners of the award include Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney, and Seth Lerer.

“I am truly honored by this award and delighted by the irony that it is made in the name of a wonderful writer, Truman Capote, who contradicts most of the generalizations about postwar American fiction made in my book,” McGurl said. “I’m proud to think that I have helped move the conversation about creative writing and the university forward a few steps and shed new light on recent literary history, but humbled by this reminder that contemporary literature is a much larger and richer enterprise than any one book or critic could grasp.”

Many critics have strong opinions about the general effects of the now-ubiquitous creative writing programs that McGurl studied. They’re often accused of having ushered in a formulaic approach and standard tone which detractors suggest now dominate and degrade American fiction. McGurl doesn’t hold that view himself, but wrote The Program Era because he recognized the lack of an objective study of the effects of their prominence:

“It is only a small exaggeration to say that the rise of the creative-writing program has been entirely ignored in interpretive studies of postwar literature,” McGurl wrote. “Discussion of the writer’s relation to the university has instead largely been confined to the domain of literary journalism and to the question of whether the rise of the writing program has been good or bad for American writing.”

Rather than a mere history of these programs, then, The Program Era became a major study of American fiction. Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, observed, “McGurl’s book is not a history of creative-writing programs. It’s a history of twentieth-century fiction, in which the work of American writers from Thomas Wolfe to Bharati Mukherjee is read as reflections of, and reflections on, the educational system through which so many writers now pass.”

In the video below, produced by UCLA, McGurl discusses the book and outlines his take on American fiction in the era of the creative writing program.

 

Mario Vargas Llosa Awarded 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

We at Harvard University Press would like to offer our fond congratulations to Mario Vargas Llosa on having been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon hearing the news this morning, HUP Editor-in-Chief Susan Wallace Boehmer understood, finally, why she’s sought to make permanent a piece of digital ephemera. 

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Almost exactly three years ago, I received a lovely message on my voice mail at HUP. “Hello Susan. This is Mario. Mario Vargas Llosa ...” I listened and then saved it, and I’ve resaved it every thirteen days since. Eighty-five times I’ve hit the 9 button on my phone, to keep Harvard from consigning this precious connection to some telephonic graveyard. 

Believe me, more than once I’ve asked myself where this obsessive-compulsive behavior was coming from. Today, with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature, I got my answer. I don’t know how long “Mario. Mario Vargas Llosa” has been on the short list in Stockholm, but in Cambridge he’s been on my short list of Most Wonderful Authors I Have Ever Worked With for four years. 

 It started when I had the privilege of editing a book of his essays, Wellsprings, which grew out of the Richard Ellmann Lectures at Emory University in 2006. I—along with fourteen hundred others—packed into Atlanta’s Glenn Memorial Church to be captivated for three days, as Vargas Llosa spoke about the three masters whose literary voices resonated in his own work. Of one of them, Cervantes, he had this to say: “It is easy to forget, in the midst of all this critical acclaim, that Cervantes was a person like all of us, faced with the pitfalls of an uncertain destiny, whose work was not conceived miraculously or by chance but was achieved through determination, hard work, craftsmanship, and patience.” On a morning that brings Mario—and the world—such fabulous news, I can’t think of a better description of the soft-spoken, generous man I briefly came to know. 

So, to paraphrase my precious phone message: “Hello Mario. This is Susan. Susan Wallace Boehmer. I just wanted to tell you that I have heard about your Nobel Prize in Literature, and I like it very much. I think you have done a wonderful job. Thank you, Mario. I will call you later.”

Carol Padden wins MacArthur Fellowship

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just announced its list of 2010 MacArthur Fellows, who will each receive a “no strings attached” stipend of $500,000 over the next five years. We are proud to share the news that Sign Language Linguist Carol Padden is among the 23 winners of this so-called “Genius Award.” We have twice had the honor of publishing Dr. Padden’s work. In 1998 we published Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture, considered a path-breaking transformation of the then-nascent field of deaf history. Inside Deaf Culture followed in 2004 and was hailed as a fascinating inside look at the development of group identity among deaf people. You can visit the MacArthur Foundation’s site for a video in which Dr. Padden describes her work. Below, Elizabeth Knoll, HUP Senior Editor for the Behavioral Sciences, Education, and Law, explains the importance of Dr. Padden’s research and also recalls her initial meeting with Dr. Padden and her husband, Tom Humphries. 

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Nobody single-handedly, or single-bookedly, creates social change. But sometimes there are books that see and say what others have seen and are still not quite able to say. Deaf in America and Inside Deaf Culture are two of those books. In them, Carol Padden and her co-author and husband Tom Humphries argued compellingly that the deaf were not pitiable victims of a physical deficiency, limited by a disability. They are the heirs and creators of an historically rich culture, of communities, schools, clubs, theatre, and art. To be Deaf is not just to be deaf. 

What has been even more influential is Padden and Humphries’s powerfully made case for American Sign Language—that it’s not simply an enormous set of gesticulations, as many hearing people might vaguely assume, but a language as grammatically structured and complex as any spoken language. That linguists now study ASL, and high schools offer courses in ASL along with Spanish and French, shows the impact of Padden and Humphries’s work. 

What I particularly admire about Carol is the skill—and energy!—with which she acts as a translator and intermediary between the Deaf and hearing world. The first time I met her and Tom, she made our three-way conversation possible by simultaneously translating everything I said orally into ASL for Tom, and everything Tom said in ASL into spoken English for me, and going back and forth herself between ASL for Tom and English for me. It was an amazing performance, and all the more amazing because I knew that this was essentially what she had been doing every single day, for her whole adult life. Her books are for both the Deaf and hearing worlds, and have changed them both.

On Zion's Mount wins Parkman Prize

On the heels of the news that Thomas Andrews's Killing for Coal has won a Bancroft Prize comes word that another book in Western History published by HUP has won a prestigious award. Jared Farmer has been honored with the Francis Parkman Prize by The Society of American Historians for his 2008 book On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which details how Mormon settlers in Utah endowed their new homeland with a spiritual geography -- how they made themselves "native" in a strange land -- and how their effort to confer meaning on their new dwelling place came at the expense of the Utes they displaced, people whom, ironically enough, they considered their "spiritual kin." Farmer, Assistant Professor of History at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, shows how this pattern, this imbuing of the American landscape with "Indian" lore that hadn't existed until Euro-American settlers showed up, was repeated time and time again across the United States, and how the legacy of these cultural acts remains with us today. It's a magnificent book; we're glad the committee shares our enthusiasm and most of all, congrats to Professor Farmer on being recognized in this way.

||| More on On Zion's Mount, including blurbs, reviews, excerpt and index.

Killing for Coal wins Bancroft Prize

Great news -- Thomas Andrews, the author of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, has been awarded a Bancroft prize, three of which are awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University. From the press release that went out earlier today:

One of the most coveted honors in the field of history, the Bancroft is awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University to the authors of books of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy. The 2009 awards are for books published in 2008.

Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley will present the awards at a formal dinner next month at the university’s Low Memorial Library, hosted by the department of history and University Libraries. The Bancroft Prize, which includes an award of $10,000 to each author, is administered by James Neal, vice president for information services and University Librarian.

“Over 200 books were nominated for consideration by the Bancroft jury this year,” said Neal. “Once again, we were very impressed by the number of excellent submissions covering a broad range of themes, and are proud to honor this year’s winners. The Bancroft prize is a celebration and affirmation of historical scholarship, the library, the book, the academic press, and the reportedly threatened scholarly monograph.”

Big-time congratulations to Professor Andrews on winning this prestigious award. Killing for Coal is indeed fantastic; for a little more on the book and the Ludlow Massacre it details, see Caleb Crain's New Yorker review of January 19.

Los Angeles Times Book Prize -- Freeberg a finalist

Congratulations to Ernest Freeberg, whose Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent has been selected as one of five finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. Freeberg, a historian at the University of Tennessee, is also the author of The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language.

Glowing green

... not with envy, but with GFP, or green fluorescent protein, discovered in the early 1960s by three scientists studying jellyfish off the west coast of North America. Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien have now been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of and subsequent research into the remarkable sustance known as GFP, which turned out to have all kinds of uses beyond making jellyfish light up (did you know, however, that the last German submarine destroyed during World War I had its position betrayed by bioluminescent plankton?). Once harnessed, GFP turned out to be one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the twentieth century -- after figuring out how to attach it to a protein, researchers could then follow the glow of the GFP to determine when that protein was made and where it traveled. It's fair to say that GFP revolutionized our understanding of molecular biology, transforming our study of everything from the AIDS virus to the workings of the brain.

The story of this remarkable discovery and of the scientists who produced it is told with aplomb in Vincent Pieribone and David F. Gruber's Aglow in the Dark: The Revolutionary Science of Biofluorescence, out in paperback from HUP. Aglow in the Dark is popular science at its best, traversing the continents and the decades to explain the the sheer wonder of bioluminescence and its near-miraculous applications in the life sciences.

More facts about GREEN (from the Sensational Color website, chock full of color facts):

• Green occupies more space in the spectrum visible to the human eye than most colors.
• Green is second only to blue as a favorite color.
• In several religions, green is the color associated with resurrection and regeneration.
• Green was the favorite color of George Washington, the first President of the United States.

GREEN quote of the day:

• "Absolute green is the most restful color, lacking any undertone of joy, grief, or passion. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes tedious." -- Wassily Kandinsky

||| Learn more about Aglow in the Dark.

Nerve fibers from neurons that contain the gene for yellow fluorescent protein.