Harvard University Press Blog

Celebrating University Press Week

In celebration of the tenth annual University Press Week, we are sharing the “famous last words” from ten of our most noteworthy books of the last ten years. This listicle represents the depth and breadth, not to mention the surprising variety, of titles we’ve published. Whether in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, art, education, or social science, the words of these authors are the final statement from their critically acclaimed works.

Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) 

“By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life—our affectively complicated relation to commodities, information, and performing, the ways in which we labor, exchange, and consume—one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century, reenergizing the former by ensuring its continued relevance to the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”

Sunil S. Amrith / Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)

“Oceanic history is itself a kind of cartography. By foregrounding the Bay of Bengal—linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power—we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation- states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials, to a more fluid, more uncertain world: a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are ever fickle.”

Thomas Piketty / Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)

“To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

Pat Shipman / The Invaders (2015)

“We may be more successful at preserving biological diversity and truly wild places as we see more clearly the factors that diminish them. We may be able to envision more accurately humans’ place in nature, for the good of all. I think it is time we recognized ourselves for what we are: the invaders. If one day we can meet the enemy of the earth and he is not us, it will be a triumph. But a big change in our behavior must happen first.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen / Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

“I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.”

Mehrsa Baradaran / The Color of Money (2017)

“Modernity will inevitably bring us closer together, which can lead to either greater resentment or greater cooperation. Perhaps more people will realize that what benefits a minority will also benefit the majority. Full racial integration will eventually remove pockets of blight, crime, and deprivation across the country. This will advance the entire American population. Integrated schools will improve education for all students, and increased equality will spur economic growth. We must shed the destructive myths that separate can equal, that a segregated economy will reach prosperity on its own, or that black banks can lead to black prosperity without fundamental economic changes. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto black communities alone. W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that ‘we have not tried it.’ Perhaps it’s time to try.”

Donna Zuckerberg / Not All Dead White Men (2018)

“Feminists deserve a better internet. And future generations of readers deserve a better kind of discourse about the ancient world: one that is free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive.”

 

 

Anthony Abraham Jack / The Privileged Poor (2019)

“My work at Midtown College and Renowned University provides strong evidence that the differences I have observed between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged has to do with their disparate precollege experiences rather than with differences between them before high school. This work points out the shortcomings of treating lower-income undergraduates as a homogenous group of at-risk students. Studies that do so cannot properly measure the effects of inequality and poverty on college experiences, and as a result, they lead to biased understandings of how class and culture reproduce inequality in college. I have documented large differences between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly disadvantaged, and both groups are represented in increasing numbers at elite colleges and universities. It is important for scholars to fully explore and document their experiences and recognize their distinctiveness.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood / Marking Time (2020)

“Smith and other artists whose work interrogates incarceration are involved in relational practices that put them in conversation, in connection, in community with Ojore Lutalo, the Fariton collective, Tyra Patterson, Deal Gillispe, Lisette Oblitas, Eddie Kates, Tameca Cole, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins, friends and activists, and others held in captivity, excluded from civil society, public life, family structures. The works of these artists and activists extend radical imaginaries and relational practices beyond the regulatory and isolating structures of imprisonment to envision and help create a world without human caging.”

Marie Favereau / The Horde (2021)

“There was as much a Jochid way of empire as there was a Roman way, an Ottoman way, and a British way. When we think about the legacy of empires, we of course recognize the cosmopolitan effects of the Mediterranean, European, and Ottoman powers that made the world smaller through practices of tolerance, coercion, exploitation, protection, investment, and conquest. These empires are credited with driving global history. But nomads drove global history, too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”

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Nicole Fleetwood and Monica Muñoz Martinez Awarded MacArthur Fellowships

Harvard University Press congratulates its authors Nicole Fleetwood and Monica Muñoz Martinez for being named to the 2021 class of 25 MacArthur Fellows. The prestigious no-strings-attached $625,000 awards are given to individuals “who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Fleetwood’s book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, is a powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. In it, she shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender.

Fleetwood also curated a similarly titled exhibition (which includes art that appears in the book) by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists at MoMa PS1 that opened last year.

She’ll use a portion of the award money to bring the exhibition to other parts of the country.

“To me, one of the great gifts for people who go to the show or read the book is that it challenges their assumptions about who’s incarcerated, why they are incarcerated, and what they do with their time,” Fleetwood told the New York Times.

A multiple award-winner, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Martinez is a moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. It details how between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law enforcement—including the renowned Texas Rangers—killed Mexican residents with impunity. The full extent of the violence was known only to the relatives of the victims. Martinez turns to the keepers of this history to tell this riveting and disturbing untold story.

The relevance of this history to what has happened at the border during the past couple of years has not gone unnoticed. The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote that the book is “a reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new.”

“As a historian who studies histories of racist violence, and who studies the long struggle for civil rights and for social justice, it is unsettling every day to see so many of the dangerous patterns from the past repeating,” Martinez said in the same New York Times article.

“We are living in a moment where there are organized efforts to restrict rights: Voting rights, reproductive rights, you could talk about immigration all afternoon. There is so much at stake.”

Stanley Cavell, Philosopher Untamed

The great Stanley Cavell died late last month at the age of 91. Below, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters recalls what made Cavell so special.

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Why not use the word “star,” Stanley asked in his breakthrough book on movies, The World Viewed, why not “the more beautiful and more accurate word,” rather than actor or actress? In philosophy he was a Hepburn, a Brando, a Dean, a Bacall, stars into whose souls he gave us entryways. I always thought of him and Hilary Putnam as the “glimmer twins.” Time was on their side, for so many decades, thank the lord. And on ours, too!

We know he was here, and, alas, we know he’s gone now.

Stanley attended monthly meetings of the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics. He dressed beautifully to attend our meetings, and he did his homework for them carefully, and spoke articulately on behalf of the books we had asked him to report on.

And he would join the Press staff for ordinary/extraordinary events like the showing over bag lunches of Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter, a movie he’d pried open and made bloom in a chapter of his book Cities of Words, which we’d just published. A simple pleasure he shared with us on a summer day in the third floor conference room at 79 Garden Street.

He walked our earth, and we published many of his words once they’d started to flow from his pen, his typewriter, his word processor, when he’d overcome the long blockage wrought by his father’s wraith and wrath.

In the Camelot years, as I am wont to think of them, Stanley was a knight of the realm under the directorship of Arthur Rosenthal, serving at the Press Round Table for meetings with other nobles such as Helen Vendler, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Samuel Huntington.

That he was a wonder was proven, paradoxically, by the vehemence of those who strove to deny he existed, from his father to a host of pygmies in cinema
studies—a field he can fairly be said to have invented—and philosophy, two “professions” he offended deeply. And though a knight of Arthur’s table he was never cavalier: he shined his shoes and wore a tie to our Syndics’ meetings, but always chafed at the notion of belonging to a profession. Philosophy, truly, has always been untamed; as a human activity it predates all universities and all professions.

The Image of Obama

Portrait of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley

This week brought the unveiling of the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery. Each image is both visually striking and laced with symbolic meaning, as well as imbued with the significance of the nation’s first African American presidential couple having selected African American artists to produce their likenesses. The former first lady tapped Amy Sherald, who employs a stylized realism in her portraits of African American subjects and has relatively recently garnered art world acclaim. For his portrait, Barack Obama selected Kehinde Wiley, who’s known for depicting young black people in portraits that echo earlier traditions of painting.

The art historian and critic Kobena Mercer considered Wiley’s work in an essay included in the tenth and final volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art. While the nine preceding books cover the ways in which mostly European artists have presented people of African descent through history, the tenth turns the series towards the rise of black artists in the twentieth century. In his essay, “New Practices, New Identities: Hybridity and Globalization,” Mercer places Wiley alongside artists like Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Bradford.

Here’s some of Mercer on Wiley:

Joining archival and portraiture thematics, paintings by Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles, California) transport the viewer to the realm of the seventeeth-century European Baroque. In works such as Portrait of Pablillos de Valladolid, Buffon de Phillip IV, II (2005), the second Roman numeral in the title signifies a contemporary doubling of a 1636-1637 portrait by Diego Velázquez. Substituting an African American man adorned in late twentieth-century hyperblack vernacular style for the original figure—in this case, an actor in the Spanish royal court—the artist asks young men on city streets if they would like their portraits painted, and individuals then select a work from a catalogue of canonical portraits. Code-switching black street style with the self-glorification of European noblemen does not aggrandize the former in terms set by the latter but sets off interruptive discrepancies that question the codes through which male power is portrayed. Wiley titled his Passing/Posing exhibition of 2003 after his observation that young black men appropriate the inner-city street as a runway on which to perform identities for an audience. Black male self-fashioning with baggy jeans, branded clothes, ritual handshakes, and body language that struts or limps rather than walks employs the artifice of style to counteract perceptions that black men with limited life choices are powerless. But on the two-way street of Wiley’s portraiture, the posturing driven by self-protective defenses exists on a transcultural continuum with displays of power in Western art history that also relied on deliberately ostentatious performances in the stylized language of clothes. “Ultimately, what I’m doing is jacking history,” the artist says. “I’m emptying out the original. It’s almost a type of drag anyway.”

Mercer goes on to note the ways in which Wiley’s decorative designs—patterned backgrounds like the greenery against which he placed Obama—“isolate his figures in an intensified realm of purely pictorial space” and “reveal vulnerability that macho posing tries to mask.” It’s fascinating to consider the layering involved in Wiley’s having gone from portraits of urban black male youth who’ve adopted “macho posing” to this painting of Obama, who’s famously comported himself in a manner designed to negate the stereotyped expectations of African American manhood with which Wiley’s earlier work plays, and from subjects who’ve employed “the artifice of style” to counter perceptions of their powerlessness to one who’s consciously sought to make others comfortable with his great power.

Vermont’s Healing Spaces

In Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, Dr. Esther Sternberg brought neuroscience, immunology, and architecture together to look closely at how one’s immediate physical surroundings can affect mood, the immune system, neural functioning, and general health. Drawing equally on the history of medicine and on emerging knowledge, Sternberg sought to demonstrate the complex relationships between health and environment. The findings presented in the book have broad application, but the central concern for healing made hospitals and other healthcare institutions the main focus of the book’s prescriptions.

And now comes word that the hospitals of Vermont have taken a step towards filling them. Inspired by Healing Spaces, the Susan Sebastian Foundation has completed the multi-year project of installing original works of art in each of the state’s roughly 400 inpatient hospital rooms. Sternberg, who didn’t learn of the project until it was near completion, confessed feeling deeply moved by the story. “When you write a book,” she said, “you never know the impact it will have, and to see my words made into reality on this scale is tremendously fulfilling.”

Tremendously fulfilling, indeed.

Alibaba and the Authentically Original Imitations

Under fire for the prevalence of counterfeit goods available through his company’s platforms, e-commerce giant Alibaba’s Executive Chairman and co-founder Jack Ma explained that policing is a greater challenge now that the fakes are often of better quality than the authorized goods. “The problem,” said Ma, “is that the fake products today, they make better quality, better prices than the real names. The exact factories, the exact same materials, but they do not use their names.”

Like a blind taste test pitting fine wine against jugged swill, this condition threatens our notions of quality and authenticity, forcing recognition of the extent to which “copying” permeates our culture. That prevalence sparked artist and critic Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying, a book that ranges from Buddhism to Baudrillard and Heidegger to hip hop in search of answers to a seemingly simple question: what is a copy? In the excerpt below, Boon circles the knock-off luxury that now plagues Jack Ma.

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Brooklyn, New York, April 2008. A row of street stalls in front of graffiti-covered iron gates. Tables full of merchandise: Louis Vuitton handbags and wallets, with their familiar “LV” monograms; brown and beige; white with multicolor fruit-like designs. You can find them for sale on Canal Street in New York, in the night markets of Hong Kong and Singapore or the covered market in Mexico City, and in many other places around the world where the urban poor go to shop—“LV” articles piled up alongside the Patek Philippe watches, Chanel perfume, North Face jackets, and Adidas shoes. Copies, fakes, counterfeits; cheap, poorly made reproductions…or are they? For you are not in a night market, or on the street. You are standing inside the Brooklyn Museum, surrounded by cameras and elegantly dressed men and women; Kanye West is performing in another room in the building. This is the opening night for Copyright Murakami, a retrospective devoted to the work of Japanese visual artist Takashi Murakami, including his celebrated collaborations with Louis Vuitton, such as the multicolor monogram handbag you just saw. And the bags in the street stalls are the real thing, made by Louis Vuitton, for sale at high prices. According to spokesmen for the company, the fake street stalls selling fake fakes are intended to draw attention to the phenomenon of counterfeiting, the production of illegal copies of Louis Vuitton’s products.

Vuitton handbags have been called the most copied objects in the world. This statement, part of the folklore of contemporary global consumer culture, seems immediately open to question. Louis Vuitton, after all, is a manufacturer of luxury goods which are defined, even in this age of global branding, by their scarcity. Internet folklore has it that only 1 percent of Louis Vuitton bags are actually made by the company. The copies, then, would be the 99 percent made by others. The selling of such mass-produced copies—which in its current form can be dated back to the 1970s, when Vuitton bags began to be made en masse in various East Asian locations—is not a new thing. In fact, Vuitton’s famous “LV” monogram was developed in 1896 by Louis Vuitton’s son Georges, as a trademark that would authenticate the family firm’s products, in response to the alleged copying of Vuitton Senior’s checkered-cloth design. Although Georges designed the monogram to distinguish his company’s products, today it is the distinctive “LV” logo that makes the bags so easy to copy.

Unflattening Commended for Excellence in Humanities

Earlier this month, the Association of American Publishers announced the recipients of the 40th annual PROSE awards, which recognize the best works in professional and scholarly publishing. The submissions were judged on the noteworthiness and originality of their contributions to the professional and scholarly publishing world. Chosen to share the Award for Excellence in Humanities was Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis, which we published last spring.

As PROSE Awards Chairman John A. Jenkins noted in his address to the audience, “All PROSE Award winners from this year demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing the magnitude of professional and scholarly publishing through their pioneering works,” and Unflattening, an academic study in comic book form, is a testament to that commitment. Sousanis argues that we are taught to think in boxes and perceive ideas in a specific way, and Unflattening represents his effort to situate visual thinking in human experience in order to step outside the confines of thought prompted by written text. Addressing science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, Sousanis’s hand-drawn panels aim to show that perception is an active process of evaluating viewpoints. As editor Sharmila Sen explained to Inside Higher Ed, the book compels our brain to work on two planes, absorbing information sequentially and all at once, “push[ing] us intellectually, cognitively.”

This intellectual urging is representative of our efforts to explore new scholarship and give readers new ways of thinking about intellectual ideas. In an era when university presses seek to reflect the innovation that characterizes contemporary culture while still honoring our mission of disseminating thoughtful, scholarly works to the public, Unflattening represents a synthesis of quality scholarship and inventive thinking. The book has resonated widely, and was recognized by Forbes, The Independent, The New York Observer, Panels, and Print as one of the best books of 2015.

American Cinema, Lost and Found

In a few weeks the Museum of Modern Art will unveil a new installation titled “100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History.” The show’s centerpiece is seven reels of recently recovered footage shot in 1913 for a Bert Williams film project that was abandoned before completion. As detailed by the New York Times, the reels represent the earliest surviving footage for a feature film with a black cast, and also give insight into the production process itself. Below, Cara Caddoo, author of Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life, explains why the materiality of such films makes further discoveries less and less likely, just as we’re gaining a wider understanding of the workings and importance of early black cinema.

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Production still from Bert Williams Lime Kiln Field Day Project. 1913. Odessa Warren Grey and Bert Williams

Late last month, MoMA announced its curators had discovered footage from the oldest black cast film in existence. The previously unreleased 1913 film stars Bert Williams, one of the most popular stage performers of the day, and was co-directed by an African American. It’s a remarkable discovery, because only a handful of black-cast and black-directed films from the silent era exist today.

Unfortunately, this 1913 gem is probably one of the last films of its generation to have survived the century. Until the 1950s, most movies were shot on nitrate film, a fragile, highly combustible material that quickly corrodes without proper preservation. Less than 15% of the films made before 1930, including big Hollywood productions, still exist. Since time is the enemy of nitrate film, the prospect of recuperating lost films becomes more unlikely each year. As a consequence, most early black films will never be recovered.

The 1913 Bert Williams film has ignited interest in the diverse roles African Americans played in the making of modern cinema. But just as we are beginning to grasp the magnitude of these contributions, are the sources for accessing them slipping away? Is the history of black film lost to us?

Fortunately, African Americans left other records that can help us recover this history. Black newspapers, census reports, and church records offer ample proof of an important but forgotten past in which men and women were pioneers of the motion pictures. Before Hollywood, even before the nickelodeon theater, African Americans produced, exhibited, and watched films together.

They did so at a time when segregation divided the nation. Beginning in the 1890s, African Americans began to transform their churches, schools, and fraternal lodges into motion picture theaters during off-hours. They also produced films that celebrated the achievements of black leaders. Vibrant black film cultures blossomed across the country, from St. Louis, Missouri, to Jacksonville, Florida, and Washington, D.C. This wasn’t just by chance. At the turn of the century, these cities were attracting hundreds of thousands black migrants from the countryside who were eager to make the most of their lives as free people, and to claim, as WEB Du Bois once wrote, their “God-given right to play.”

Meanwhile, white theaters, even in the North, abided by the rules of Jim Crow segregation. They reserved only the worst seats of the house, known as the “buzzard’s roost” or “nigger heaven,” for black audiences. In these theaters, films that depicted black characters as violent, ignorant, and less-than-human were especially popular.

Such films, and their racist, degrading images of black characters, have been most likely to survive over subsequent decades. It’s partially a matter of scale; black filmmakers had limited resources and produced fewer films. But for most of the past century, film archivists and collectors focused on preserving the “classics,” films such as D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, which retold the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction by recasting the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors of the South.

For this reason, MoMA’s discovery is all the more exhilarating—an artifact that has survived more than a century against all odds. Yet although the survival of this 1913 film is exceptional, our emerging understanding of early-twentieth century black film culture proves that the contributions of its black cast and director were not unusual. Even in the absence of reels of film and motion picture stills, we must celebrate these achievements. And the thrill of new discoveries should not let us forget the tragic forces that ensured the rarity of recovering such films. In short, both what we have lost and what we find are part of the longer history of American cinema.

The Image of the Belle

As film critic Manohla Dargis notes in her review, the new movie Belle is “enough of an old-fashioned entertainment that it could have been made in classic Hollywood,” save for the fact of its main character’s race. Belle, which opened last weekend in New York and L.A. and adds cities and screens throughout this month, is based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy officer and a black woman of uncertain status in 18th century England. The story presented by the film has much in common with an Austen novel, but with the added element of a heroine coming to terms with her race and its meaning in a slave society.

The film was inspired by a striking portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle with her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, a painting that—quite against custom—depicted no apparent subservience of its black subject to its white. The painting, the artist of which has been lost to history, features in the third volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, our nearly complete ten book series tracing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times.

In “Court and City: Fantasies of Domination,” an essay written by series co-editor David Bindman and Helen West, the painting is considered within the 18th century tradition of presenting black pages, grooms, and servants as status symbols for the white people who are the art’s ostensible subjects. In this case, though, and several other works that Bindman and West highlight, there’s a way of seeing the racial hierarchy as slightly undercut by a certain quality of freedom in the person of color found lacking in the white subject’s formal pageantry.

Here’re Bindman and West on the contrast drawn between the countenance and costume of Dido Elizabeth Belle and that of her cousin:

[A] relationship between liberty and formality appears in a later anonymous painting of Lady Elizabeth Murray, a niece of Lord Mansfield, the judge in the landmark Somerset case (so important in the history of abolition), who is accompanied by Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter by a black woman of Sir John Lindsay, a nephew of Mansfield. Dido seems to have had an ambiguous position in the household as both servant and family member, but in the portrait difference is emphatically signaled through skin color, dress, and demeanor. Though affection is expressed in Lady Elizabeth’s outstretched hand, her formality and bookishness is contrasted with the wild and exotically turbaned figure of Dido, whose fruits and branches and open smile make her a Caliban-like figure of untamed nature. Her position was unusual, for her parentage was evidently fully acknowledged; she was placed, like a free person of color in the West Indies, in an ambiguous position, treated with familial affection yet also evidently as a domestic servant, though Lord Mansfield left her an annual allowance on his death in 1793 and she was able to marry in the same year. In this portrait…we have come some distance from the earlier typology of such portraits, in which black servants were pets to the woman portrayed; now their “savagery” is to be envied rather than castigated.

The story told by Belle, even though padded by departures from the slim historical record of Dido, serves to remind us of the great many people presented in the thousands of works archived by The Image of the Black in Western Art, and the ways in which the series serves as a vital source in the history not just of art but of lives.

What Is a Scholarly Book?

University and academic presses have long been essential to the sharing of new ideas and challenging of old assumptions, a tradition we’re celebrating during this second annual University Press Week. This year’s focus is on the ways in which AAUP member presses are helping to drive innovation in both format and subject matter, and so today we’re pleased to offer a UP Week Blog Tour post from Harvard professor Jeffrey Schnapp on the future of scholarly communication. Schnapp is Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures, faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and general editor of the metaLABprojects series, the first three titles of which we’ll publish in June.

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What is a scholarly book? The question has an artificial ring to it even today, in the midst of a revolution that is steamrolling just about every sector of publishing, crushing longstanding assumptions but also clearing new spaces for experimentation and conversation.

To nearly anyone who has had the privilege of belonging to a research community over the course of the past century, the scholarly book has long seemed something of a given. And what was given was a set of conventions that, in the course of the twentieth century, gelled into verities that varied only slightly with respect to discipline and field. They encompassed notions regarding the proper scale and scope of a scholarly argument; the units that make such arguments up; the primacy of certain forms of evidence; standards of reference and proof; and a basic toolkit of argumentative units (from words to paragraphs to pages to subchapters to chapters). Bundled up into a discrete, compact, mechanically reproduced unit, nourished and sustained by university publishing, the structure in question has served the cause of learning exceptionally well over the course of the past century.

No wave of any digital magic wand is about to vaporize the scholarly book or the medium of print (any more than readers are about to give up their corporeality in order to evolve into pixels on an LCD). But as knowledge forms migrate to digital platforms along with nearly everything else, from culture and scholarship to archives and social networks, new alignments arise. Revolutions in media are never reducible to the mere substitution of old media by the new. Rather, they are about reshufflings of decks into which new cards have been inserted. This implies the emergence of new genres, norms, and forms. It also implies new hybridities that, in the case of the digital revolution, permit riffing off of convergences and divergences between the online and the offline, the digital and the analog.

The scholarly book was overdue for an overhaul and in my own work along the edges of what is now referred to as the Digital Humanities (but that I usually think of in terms of “knowledge design”), experimentation with new models and modes of bookishness has been a key concern. What could or should books become in the digital age? What medium-specific functions do we now want them to perform or relinquish? What’s the look of new or emerging knowledge forms when they find their way into print?