University Press Week: What’s #NextUp in Publishing?

Continuing our celebration of University Press Week 2022, we’re happy to share what’s #NextUp in publishing! We’ll turn it over to Charles Brower, Senior Project Editor of Journals here at Duke University Press.

Since 2020, the books and journals project editors of Duke University Press’s Editing, Design, and Production (EDP) department have sponsored a mentorship program for BIPOC students and recent graduates who are interested in pursuing a career in scholarly publishing. Our goal has been to provide a solid grounding in editing and editorial project management particularly, and more generally to try to offer a solution to that perpetual dilemma faced by so many—especially those from underrepresented groups—who aspire to enter the profession but have no publishing experience. In addition to the practical experience they get as student interns working for our editorial group, our mentees participate in in-depth discussions of copyediting, house style, workflows, interacting with authors, and many other topics that fall under the broad umbrella of editorial and scholarly publishing professional skills. By the end of their participation in the program, mentees are conversant, if not yet fluent, in the Chicago Manual of Style and have a specific, detailed sense of the work we do. 

The program had a relatively modest beginning: our mentee would meet with me and a colleague from the books side of our editorial group in a weekly or biweekly Zoom meeting, as the mentee’s work and/or school schedule allowed. In a sense, the Great Cloistering brought on by the pandemic had a silver lining with respect to these sessions, since we were able to meet the mentees wherever they happened to be working or studying. The colleague I partnered with for the first two years has left the press, but two other colleagues have stepped up to participate this year. And our ambitions for the new year are to involve even more colleagues from around the press to introduce our mentees to many other scholarly publishing roles and professional opportunities. 

It’s our hope, of course, that we have a lasting, positive effect on the nascent careers of these young people, even if they decide to enter another profession. Without exception, the participants in the program have been engaged, enthusiastic, and idealistic, and if they do become colleagues in scholarly publishing, they’ll be boons to the profession. And while our mission always is to support and inspire our mentees, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I too have gotten a great deal out of participating in the program, whether through revisiting the habits and ethos that define how I edit or through interacting with and being inspired by a talented young person. I encourage anyone in the scholarly community reading this to look for opportunities to mentor, whether through similar programs at your institution or by reaching out to a junior colleague. The potential benefits for them, you, and the profession generally can’t be overstated. 

-Charles Brower 

Please continue on the blog tour by visiting the other university presses participating today. Head over to Temple University Press to read about their new Transformations book series, then check out the University Press of Kansas‘s feature on their new Lyda Conley Series on Trailblazing Indigenous Futures. The University of Pittsburg Press shares an interview with their new Acquisitions Editor Will Hammell about starting new areas of acquisition, and the University of Nebraska Press features a blog post about their Provocations series. The University of Minnesota Press details new developments in the Manifold digital publishing platform, the University of North Carolina Press unveils their new Black Women’s History series, and Leuven University Press spotlights the book Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation. The University Press of Kentucky gives an overview of the Appalachian Futures series with Editor Abby Freeland, the University of Notre Dame Press posts the results of their first-ever Publishing Boot Camp, and the Hopkins Press Internship Program enters is second year. The University of Florida Press offers a video with editors of their new series Caribbean Crossroads series, and the University of Michigan Press features an interview with Acquisitions Editor Ellen Bauerle about a newly emerging Greek/Modern Intersections series. Read about another internship program at the University of Alabama Press, and learn about the Texas A&M University Press‘s TV show on PBS. Penn State University Press shares a post from Acquisitions Editor Archna Patel about developments in their Africana studies list, and Purdue University Press Director Justin Race outlines their new Navigating Careers in Higher Education series as well as their new website. The University of Washington Press runs a Q&A with editors of the new series, Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral, and the University of Toronto Press features a post by one of their editors about a new series. Finally, the University of Illinois Press highlights exciting changes to their Disability Histories series. 

Duke Books and Journals Available Open-Access

It’s Open Access Week! Did you know that you can read many of our books and journals for free? Duke University Press is committed to offering many of our titles in an open-access format. We participate in multiple OA programs, including Knowledge Unlatched, TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), and SHMP (the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot). Each year we release about a dozen books that are open access. You may be able to read these books online via your own library. You can also find some of them on Project MUSE, OAPEN, and on our own website.

Recent open-access books that you can read for free thanks to our partnership with Knowledge Unlatched include Cocaine, edited by Enrique Desmond Arias and Thomas Grisaffi; Claiming Union Womanhood by Brandi Clay Brimmer; Virulent Zones by Lyle Fearnley; and Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas, edited by Yolanda Covington-Ward and Jeanette S. Jouili.

Our second project with the Sustainable History Monograph Project (SHMP) is Workers Like All the Rest of Them by Elizabeth Quay Hutchison.

Recent books freely available via our partnership with TOME include The Small Matter of Suing Chevron by Suzana Sawyer, Scales of Captivity by Mary Pat Brady, The Florida Room by Alexandra T. Vazquez, and Architecture and Development by Ayala Levin.

Authors and their institutions also help us to make their books available via open access. Many readers are very excited about the open access version of Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk, which you can read for free now on our website. You can also read Paradoxes of Nostalgia by Penny Von Eschen and Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad volumes one and two by Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart for free.

Our open-access journals are Critical Times, Demography, Environmental Humanities, liquid blackness, the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, and our newest open-access journal Trans Asia Photography, which joined the Press in 2022. Twentieth-century volumes (1918–1999) of the Hispanic American Historical Review are also available open access.

Many thanks to the libraries and institutions that support all these open-access efforts. Read more about open access at Duke University Press here.

Open Access Week: Demography, a Community-Funded Journal

To celebrate Open Access Week, we’re proud to spotlight Demography, the journal of the Population Association of America. Duke University Press became the publisher of Demography beginning with its 2021 volume, converting the journal from a for-profit commercial subscription model to fully open access.

Since its founding in 1964, Demography has mirrored the vitality, diversity, high intellectual standard, and wide impact of the field on which it reports. Demography presents the highest-quality original population research of scholars in a broad range of disciplines that includes anthropology, biology, economics, geography, history, psychology, public health, sociology, and statistics. The journal encompasses a wide variety of methodological approaches to research. Its geographic focus is global, and it has a broad temporal scope.

Popular articles recently include “Academic Achievement of Children in Same- and Different-Sex-Parented Families,” “Pain Trends Among American Adults, 2002–2018,” “The Effect(s) of Teen Pregnancy,” and “Depends Who’s Asking: Interviewer Effects in Demographic and Health Surveys Abortion Data.”

Demography’s open-access funding model relies entirely on financial support from libraries and other institutions. More than 75 institutions have joined Demography as community partners, making annual commitments from $500 to over $4,000.

“The conversion of Demography is a significant opportunity for the library community to join with other stakeholders in support of sustainable, open-access, university-based publishing,” wrote Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives at library membership organization LYRASIS.

Demography has the top citation ranking in its Social Sciences Citation Index category for 2020 and the second highest impact factor, 3.984, in the category. The journal was cited 9,798 times in 2020.

“The open-access model received a lot of kudos from researchers everywhere, but especially in Europe and the Global South,” wrote Mark D. Hayward, the journal’s editor. “From my end, I couldn’t be happier with the journal’s new model. I think it gets our results into the field faster and helps the science in major ways.”

“We were excited to see the announcement that Demography had switched to a fully open-access model with Duke University Press,” wrote Colleen Lyons, Head of Scholarly Communications at the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, which is one of the journal’s community partners. “Demography is an important journal in the field and for faculty at our institution, and we are pleased to provide support to make sure this journal can continue to publish great research in a more financially viable way. Efforts like this one move the needle towards a more sustainable publishing system that prioritizes the advancement of human knowledge.”

The support of many organizations ensures that Demography’s content is available open access for population researchers all over the globe. Learn how your institution can become a community partner.

How Global Supply Chain Issues Are Affecting Duke University Press

Wherever you turn these days, people are talking about global supply chains. Shortages of everything from toilet paper to appliances to automobiles are vexing consumers and retailers alike. Unfortunately, publishing and bookselling are no different. The New York Times and Vox have both reported on how paper shortages, ink shortages, the closure of printing plants, and snarls in the global shipping industry have affected the publishing industry. 

Here at Duke University Press we are feeling the effects of these issues as well. For the past few months, we have experienced delays at our printers that have led us to lengthen production schedules on all our Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 titles, adding four weeks on average to each schedule. We are also finding that it takes longer for books to ship from the printer to our warehouse, causing further delays. Reprints ordered when a book sells out of its initial printing are also delayed along with new books.

Global shipping delays are causing orders placed on our website to take longer to reach our customers. The US Postal Service has experienced delays and is officially lengthening their expected service times this month. Carriers like UPS and Federal Express also have driver shortages that increase domestic shipping times. International shipping is especially slow due to pile-ups at US ports and a decreased reliance on air shipments for packages. CBS Sunday Morning covered these issues earlier this month and the New York Times recently wrote about the backlog at ports. 

We initially set schedules for books about 11-12 months from publication. Some authors and customers who have been tracking the schedule of a Fall 2021 or Spring 2022 title may have seen one publication date a few months ago, and a new one this fall. We know this change is frustrating. It’s frustrating to the media as well, who count on knowing a pub date at least six months out to plan their coverage. And it’s frustrating for our staff, planning their work. 

Director of Editing, Design, and Production Amy Ruth Buchanan says, “In my 26 years in publishing, this supply chain crisis is one of the worst disruptions we have ever had to navigate. Understaffed printing plants, paper shortages, and freight challenges are converging to make this season extraordinarily difficult to manage. Every time an advance arrives in my mailbox I celebrate!”

E-book links on our website

One side effect of the delays has been that our e-books are now available several weeks before our print books. Customers who are especially eager to read a book that has been delayed can purchase the e-book or get it through their library while they wait for the print. We hope this will be helpful if a book has already been scheduled for a syllabus or an event was planned months ago. If the e-book is available for a title, you’ll see a list of links to the various retailers beneath the price on our website. 

As we navigate these delays, we ask for your patience. If you would like to order books for the holidays, we suggest you shop now. If you wish to have a book shipped outside of North and South America, we encourage you to order from our UK-based distributor, Combined Academic Publishers. They will often honor our coupon codes. Canadian customers can consider ordering from their favorite local bookstore, who may be able to get stock directly from our Canadian distributor and avoid border delays.

If you are serving on an awards committee and a book you’re expecting to be submitted hasn’t arrived, please reach out to us and ask about it. It may be stuck in transit. Similarly, let us know if a review copy hasn’t reached you.

We’re doing our best to keep our authors updated as soon as we know of any schedule delay. We suggest that authors not schedule any events or book launches until at least six weeks after your project editor tells you your book will be in our warehouse. If you have questions about your book’s schedule you can contact either your project editor or your publicist. 

We see these disruptions lasting at least through fall 2022 and again ask for your patience as an author, customer, bookseller, or reviewer. 

Raising Up the Work of First-Time Authors: University Press Week 2020

It’s University Press Week! This year, the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) has chosen the theme “Raise UP” to emphasize the role that university presses play in elevating authors, subjects, and whole disciplines. Read more about University Press Week and check out the Raise UP gallery and reading list featuring publications published by our peer presses.

We’re excited to be part of the first day of the annual University Press Week blog tour. The theme is “New Voices.” After you read our post, please check out the other posts on the tour, from University of Illinois Press, Georgetown University Press, University of Wisconsin Press, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, University of Toronto Press, University of Missouri Press, Bucknell University Press, University of Manitoba Press, and Amherst College Press.

Here at Duke University Press, we’re particularly proud of the role that we play in helping to bring new voices into scholarly conversations. Below, book acquisitions editors and journal editors discuss the particular joys of working with first-time authors.

Contributors:

• Elizabeth Ault, Duke University Press Editor, Books
• Courtney Berger, Duke University Press Executive Editor, Books
• Sarah Lerner, Managing Editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies
• Susan Stryker, Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and Visiting Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University
• Ken Wissoker, Duke University Press Senior Executive Editor, Books

What unique contributions can a first-time author offer to a publishing program [or journal]?

Courtney Berger: First-time authors are often working on the cutting edge of scholarship. They are pushing against the boundaries of fields and conceptual paradigms. As an editor, I look to these scholars to stay attuned to the conversations and debates that are happening in and across fields and to learn about new fields in formation. This is incredibly valuable to me as an editor and to the Press as a whole, since it keeps our list dynamic and helps us tune into new or underserved audiences and emerging areas of knowledge making. As an editor, I am constantly learning, and my first-time authors teach me a lot, not just about their fields of study but also about changes in the academic world, how people are reading and teaching the things we publish, and the needs of scholars and teachers in the current economic and political climate.

Ken Wissoker: I always treat first book authors as the future. They frequently combine perspectives from different professors and theoretical movements they encountered in grad school (and since) and put them together in ways that the people who taught them never would. That’s true about theories and about topics to investigate as well. Also, first time authors often have had the most time for research—whether fieldwork or archival. They are writing up a project that started as a dissertation many years before.  They get guidance in how to shape and focus that research and receive feedback on the earlier versions of their work.  You’d be surprised how many times authors of subsequent books don’t know how to proceed without those advantages!

Susan Stryker: I’m always looking for the fresh hot takes that do more than add a statement to an existing conversation, but rather approach a topic in some truly new way. First-time authors often have a really generative “beginners mind.” 

Sarah Lerner: First-time authors have profound enthusiasm for their subject, and in the case of Camera Obscura, they are also excited about working with the journal’s editors during the manuscript revision process. New authors bring innovative perspectives, theories, and methods to the discipline that can change scholarly conversations about a subject. When they do, they can expand the journal’s reach.

Elizabeth Ault: Among many other things, first-time authors offer publishers a chance to engage some of the freshest perspectives in our field, and the joy, for an editor, of bringing a new voice into print and getting to build a long relationship with someone.

Are there any experiences working with first-time authors that stand out to you?

Elizabeth Ault: I have worked with so many first-time authors, especially as an emerging editor. Learning together with authors is such a gift—I’m so grateful for all the first-time authors who’ve helped me map the landscapes of their fields and the conversations their books are in as I get to teach them about the publishing process. One book I’m really proud to have worked on is The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King’s first book, published last fall. She just did a wonderful interview with Jenny Davidson at the-rambling.com about what the process of developing her central idea and navigating her archive was like through the multi-year process of developing the manuscript. It’s such a generous reflection on process. 

Courtney Berger: I really enjoy working with first-time authors, although at times the process can be stressful (on both sides!). Sometimes a manuscript goes through several rounds of review before it is ready for publication. An author might struggle to find time to write while they are also getting acclimated to a new job and new responsibilities. They may have a tough time shedding ideas and materials that are interesting but don’t serve the project as a whole. The review and revision process can be arduous, but it’s invaluable when it comes to shaping a book. It’s exciting to see a project develop and come into focus, as an author starts to recognize the critical aims of their work and can see how to enact that in their writing. Those are the best moments for me as an editor—helping an author figure out how to make the book their own and to make their ideas available to readers. 

Ken Wissoker: How quickly a scholar moves from being a first time author, unsure of their authority and whether what they write will be okay, to an expert in their field.  It’s hard for a scholar to anticipate that ahead of time, or to write in a way that takes advantage of how they will be seen. I love when authors feel passionately about their work and their topic, but haven’t fully realized how widely it will be of interest.  Some of my best experiences have been reflecting back to an unsure author how many people would be excited about what they are doing.

Susan Stryker: I once received a submission from a grad student for a special issue I was editing that I really wanted to publish because it was fresh and insightful but also kind of a mess structurally. I offered to work closely with the author to get it the piece in publishable quality before sending it out for peer review. Going that extra mile as a hands-on editor for a first-time author resulted in what has turned into a years-long friendship with a really innovative emerging scholar. I feel like I got back as much or more than I gave.

What advice do you have for first-time authors?

Susan Stryker: Really, really, think about audience/editor/press and the scholarly conversation you want your work to be situated within.

Sarah Lerner: I would encourage first-time authors to ask the journal’s Managing Editor or shepherding editor (if they have one) questions about the publication process. Gaining insight into the stages that a manuscript will move through from submission to publication supports authors as they navigate an unfamiliar process. If an author knows what the next step is, they can address revisions, proofs, and other tasks with more confidence.

Courtney Berger: Don’t be afraid to share your work and solicit feedback. I find that a lot of authors hesitate to do that. They worry that the project isn’t developed enough, and they strive for perfection. Join a writing group; share your work with colleagues and friends; participate in a manuscript workshop; find out what editors think about the project. While there certainly are risks to putting your work out there, especially at an early stage, I think the benefits far outweigh those risks. Criticism can help an author shape their project and find their voice. Soliciting feedback allows you to think of writing as a conversation: you want a response. And the response can help you to reshape, clarify, or reconsider what you want to say. 

Ken Wissoker: Think about what parts of books in your field you love, and what parts you skim past. Ask your cohort. Where do you need the detail and where the big picture? Where the author’s voice and where that of others in the field? Try to write accordingly! Write for the people in grad school behind you who will look up to you, not for the senior people who you are worried will judge you. Take yourself seriously as a theorist (big or small) and write to convince people of your theory, not as if you were turning in a long report to someone. Find your voice. As mentioned above, the time from post-doc to person with book is comparatively short in the time of a career. In a way one has to write in the voice of the person one is just in the process of becoming. Find an editor who gets your work and will imagine it with you. 

Elizabeth Ault: Briefly, I think the most important advice is to understand and embrace the power that you and your ideas have. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or reach out–to colleagues, editors, mentors, etc. But also, be prepared when you do. Have a clear sense of what your project is about, what your argument is, how it’s different from the dissertation, what you imagine your book doing in the world, and who you imagine reading it.

But even if you have all this, it’s important to know that the process can often take a lot longer than anyone hopes! It’s not unusual for me to talk to first-time authors at conferences or over email for several years prior to their formal submission of materials for peer review. During this time, we’re building our relationship  (one of my favorite parts!) and developing the project through discussing ideas, giving feedback on introductions, talking through the structure of the project, suggesting participants for book manuscript workshops, etc. While one round of peer review usually only takes a few months, the full cycle of review and revision and Board Approval—from initial submission till a book appears IN PRINT (!)—almost always takes at least two years, and usually longer (though about a year of that is while the book is in production, being copyedited, designed, proofread, and printed, so the author’s substantive writing work is done). That can sound daunting, but I really think of it as a gift, as Ken has outlined elsewhere when talking about the importance of peer review. This long process is especially important for authors who, like most of the people I work with, are interdisciplinary scholars with ambitions to speak across scholarly conversations. 

Read more of Elizabeth Ault’s advice for first-time book authors in “Asking the Editors” in Inside Higher Ed.

What could publishers do to better support first-time authors?

Courtney Berger: Most presses and editors make efforts to help first-time authors navigate the publishing process by giving talks at conferences and at universities or through one-on-one discussions with new authors. At Duke, we’ve worked hard to connect with and support BIPOC scholars, queer & trans scholars, and scholars from marginalized groups, although there’s room to strengthen those efforts even further across the publishing industry. I also think we could do more outreach to scholars working at HBCUs, smaller universities and colleges, and non-research institutions, who may not have as much access to travel funds for major conferences (where editors tend to meet with authors) or who may not have ready access to publishing workshops and other opportunities to learn about the book publishing process. 

Ken Wissoker: Judge work on its quality, intervention, and potential impact, not the seniority or location of the authors.

Susan Stryker: I think “meet the editors” events do a lot to demystify the process, and help authors get a sense of the wide range of ways that different journals work.

Elizabeth Ault: I think posts like this and other talks/videos/etc/ that my colleagues and I have done are hugely important in demystifying the process. Being upfront about expectations and timelines is important especially with first time authors on the tenure track, since the timing can be so important. Not assuming authors understand the process—either the concrete steps of publishing (including things like selecting images and navigating fair use claims), or the more abstract parts like imagining the audience for your book or thinking about how the chapters should be ordered.

Are there any upcoming projects from first-time authors that you’re particularly excited about?

Courtney Berger: Oh my. So many! A few exciting first books that are about to be released: Evren Savci’s Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam; Ma Vang’s History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies; and Hentyle Yapp’s Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic. All three of these books push against conventional disciplinary boundaries and offer readers new theoretical tools for thinking about the complexities of race, religion, politics, and sexuality. And next fall keep an eye out for Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century America and Rana Jaleel’s The Work of Rape, two stunning first books that make us rethink the relationship between gender, sexuality, race, and U.S. imperialism.

Ken Wissoker: Two just out: Alex Blanchette’s beautiful ethnography of a grim subject in Porkopolis—the way every part of a pig’s life cycle is commercialized in a next generation taylorization products one wouldn’t even associate with a pig—while also taking over a town’s life. And Vanessa Diaz’s Manufacturing Celebrity, an ethnography of two groups that keep People and other popular magazines in business. Paparazzi, who are mostly Latinx men working independently to take photos of stars. The magazines depend on the photos, but the men are disposable and easy to vilify as if they were stalkers rather than key to the star system. She also writes about the mostly white women deployed to industry events for gossip, and become likely targets for harassment or abuse.

And one in production: Mercy Romero’s moving and deep memoir of Camden, New Jersey is one I’m really excited by.  The beauty of her writing, combined with the way she gives a picture of race and space in her hometown is totally moving.  A truly exceptional first book!

Elizabeth Ault: I just had a slate of wonderful new first books come out! Please read my recommendations for books to buy to honor the American Anthropological Association conference that, in a parallel universe, is happening right now, to find out more about several of them. 

Editorial Director Gisela Fosado Speaks Out About Jessica A. Krug

I spent last Thursday and Friday reading and processing the many stories shared on Twitter about Jessica A. Krug’s decades-long fraudulent and hurtful appropriation of a Black and Latinx identity. I have been sickened, angered, and saddened by the many years that she deployed gross racial stereotypes to build her fake identity, and the way that she coupled her lies with a self-righteous policing of racial politics within the Black and Latinx circles that she intruded upon.  

My interactions with Krug, who authored a book with Duke University Press, were limited. The first time she lied to me was in an email exchange in 2017. I had asked her how to pronounce her name. She answered, “Thanks for asking about my last name. It’s actually ‘Cruz’ and is pronounced as such. Long story, and when we meet up in person, I’ll tell you.” As an acquisition editor, I often present information about our authors and our books to colleagues across our departments, and, as someone whose name is often mispronounced, I work hard to get names right. From that point forward, everyone across our Press dutifully pronounced her name as “Cruz.”  When I met her in person for the first time the following year, shortly after her book was published, she told me the fictitious story of how her grandparents came to this country from the Caribbean and how immigration officials made a transcription mistake on their last name. She also repeated other details that I now know to be false about her identity and her past.

Those of us who are connected to Krug and her scholarship, and especially those of us who are people of color, are grappling with several layers of anger and hurt. There is the personal pain of having someone impersonate your own identity in the most racist way possible, through caricatures and stereotypes. There’s also the shameful sense that, as someone who labored to support her work as her acquisition editor, I helped publish the work of someone who, early in her career, took funding and other opportunities that were earmarked for non-white scholars. 

Many of us who promoted her work in one way or another have also struggled in trying to consider the relationship between Krug’s scholarship and her wrongdoing. There are times when a scholar does harm that can be seen as unrelated to their scholarship. In this case, Krug leveraged her deception to enable and promote her work, in ways that are not quantifiable or always specific. As others have pointed out, Krug’s scholarship may not have ever existed without the funding that was inseparable from her two decades of lies. 

What are we then to do with her scholarship, which, as it happens, has been widely praised and recognized as important? Many scholars and scholar-activists have continued to push for a focus not just on content of scholarship, but also on context, methods, ethics, and politics—often promoting decolonial approaches. These are the conversations and movements that can lead us forward. I hope that we can all muster the strength to lean into these conversations, even though they will challenge us all. 

Almost everyone I’ve spoken to about Krug’s book has asked about profits from her book. The truth is that the book, like many monographic scholarly works, did not generate a profit—its expenses were more than its revenues. Despite that, Duke University Press is committed to moving all proceeds from the book to a fund that will support the work of Black and Latinx scholars. Our conversations and deliberations about other actions will continue.

Bringing Diverse Perspectives into Scholarly Marketing and Communications: Calls to Action towards Global Outreach for Global Change

We are pleased to re-blog these essays by our staff that originally ran on The Scholarly Kitchen blog last week. The posts were solicited and are introduced by our Digital Marketing Coordinator, Kasia Repeta. 

Since COVID-19, scholarly communication professionals have rapidly moved their focus from predefined road maps and modes of operation to actively responding to the ongoing global health crisis, and more recently, the anti-racism protest movement. Both called for actions and awareness-building efforts. Featuring, or even freeing related content from behind paywalls, creating reading lists, and organizing webinars and discussion groups with experts on related topics are just a few examples of how our community is educating people about the issues, building their awareness, and providing them with access to research results.

The question arises: when the direct threat to global health and economies cease, and protesters leave the streets, will publishing communicators keep up this momentum and continue to rapidly utilize research-driven content to illuminate topics like climate change, racial injustice, minority rights, social justice, and sustainable development that require ongoing global attention? While it’s reassuring to know that there are already many programs and tools focused on increasing research discoverability and providing support for scientists to effectively convey the value of their research, there has never been a more important time to move from reacting to acting. This is a call to action for our colleagues in scholarly communications worldwide.

We’re Just Getting Warmed Up: Embracing Pandemic Chaos with Calls to Action

Dean Smith, Director, Duke University Press

“Economics should not be the first concern when thinking about health care. The cost in human lives should be,” wrote Priscilla Wald in an op-ed piece for the Charlotte Observer in late February. She is a professor of English at Duke, an author, a journal editor, and a humanist working at the intersection of science and the humanities.

Wald reached out to me to make sure that, as her publisher, I knew that her book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, published in 2007 was once again part of a growing pandemic discussion.

In her piece, entitled “The Best Way to Prevent an Outbreak like Coronavirus,” she also states that universal access to health care will lead to fewer sick people making it easier to contain the virus.

We now know she was clearly onto something regarding access — and so were we. A few days later, our marketing and sales department made Wald’s book freely available on our website and mobilized resources to create several open access syllabi related to the pandemic.

On March 10th, Amazon suspended the ordering of our books to focus on medical supplies. Our planned Spring Sale began on the same day as the Amazon announcement. The next day, we closed our warehouse. How does any publisher continue a Spring Sale without a warehouse and with one of our main distribution chains suspended?

Faced with being unable to sell any books at all, our sales and marketing department, editorial design and production team, and our digital publishing unit worked quickly to reinvent our supply chain and create more than 2,000 print-on-demand titles in just two weeks. Lightning Source and Ingram Publishing Services assisted in our transition to becoming a fully virtual publisher.

The pandemic created a call-to-action across Duke University Press. The staff embraced chaos with innovation and change. Designers organized virtual poetry readings with authors. Acquisitions editors engaged their communities on social media. The customer and library relations team offered trial access to content for institutions to help serve students who found themselves sheltering off-campus.

The 2020 Spring Sale broke all previous records. Orders went through our website. As the news changed each week, our list resonated in the moment. Books like Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe, The Black Shoals by Tiffany Lethabo King and In the Wake by Christina Sharpe became must-reads.

The pandemic syllabi resource center has generated 17,000 views. Contagious has generated 14,000 views on its own and tripled its print sales since January.

Professor Wald has been a great colleague since I joined Duke University Press last June. She taught me about what constitutes a Duke University Press book through an article by Patricia Hill Collins in the journal Social Problems (published by Oxford University Press in 1986) entitled, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought”. In it, Collins argues that many Black female intellectuals have made creative use of their marginality — their “outsider within” status—to produce Black feminist thought that reflects a special standpoint on self, family, and society. Wald served as our faculty board chair for 12 years because she is intensely dedicated to the Press’s mission.

Many of our authors, like Collins, work to center historically marginalized perspectives and knowledge (e.g., ideas from the Global South, from racially marginalized communities, and from outside of heteronormative culture). By publishing their work, we draw attention to authors with compelling and progressive ideas, and to writers who are shaping the future of their disciplines.

The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd hit our staff hard. Once again, we mobilized for change. Our Equity and Inclusion Task Force has organized conversations and trainings. Duke University President, Vincent Price, posted his Message about Racism and Inequality to members of the Duke community — an urgent and detailed call to action couched in the language of anti-racism. The work before us in the coming weeks is to align this call to action with every aspect of how we run our Press and to integrate an equity lens into our strategic plan.

University presses are publishing essential books that people need to read right now. Our publications strive to make the world a better, more informed, and more equitable place.  How do we break down the barriers of access to ensure that everyone who needs to can access our publications?

As publishers, we must invest in openness and accessibility to peer-reviewed knowledge. We must also ensure that anti-racism guides our policies, practices, and publications. As stated in the recent Statement on Equity and Antiracism from AUPresses:

Our task now is to reimagine the audiences and communities we seek to serve, the author and reviewer networks we rely on, the vendor and supplier networks we enlist, and the other structures that have excluded marginalized communities from our industry. We need to reconsider unpaid internships and low-wage entry points to our industry, as well as the recruitment and promotion strategies that have historically resulted in pay gaps and other inequities. Perhaps most important, we need equity training at the organizational level, so that those from underrepresented communities who join our industry are welcomed and empowered to lead our organizations forward in new directions.

In short, we must build a culture of introspection, honesty, humility, inclusion, and trust.

Despite this essential work, we still constantly hear the familiar refrain that university presses are facing an existential threat. That’s become a rallying cry as we move forward together as a community. Humanists like Priscilla Wald will be publishing books and journal articles about the catastrophic response to the pandemic and the global effort to end racism for the next one-hundred years.

We’re just getting warmed up.

An Internationalist Vision for Scholarly Marketing

Alejandra Mejía, Editorial Associate and Student Worker Program Manager, Duke University Press

Internationalism is an ideology that advocates a greater political and economic cooperation among nations. While the relationship between internationalism and scholarly marketing may not be immediately apparent, I propose that approaching our scholarly marketing work with an internationalist lens, or at the very least with a sensitivity toward global power dynamics and cross-cultural accessibility and connection, can make us more ethical, socially responsive publishers who can contribute towards positive global change.

In order to move in this direction, we must first acknowledge that American scholarly publishing does not exist in a vacuum. We live in a society that was built on indigenous genocide and the forced enslavement of African people and which reproduces inequality and violence. We are witnesses to the continuation of these injustices today, for example, with the soaring rates of COVID-19 cases ravaging the Navajo Nation, which lacks the proper infrastructure to handle the crisis, as well as with the state-sanctioned police violence disproportionately affecting poor and working-class Black people. We must continue to reckon with and correct this history at an institutional and societal level and, beyond that, we must also think about the role that the United States occupies in a larger global context.

For instance, brain drain, or the emigration of highly skilled workers like academics from low-to-middle income countries to wealthier ones, flows from south to north internationally (with a few notable exceptions like India and South Africa). This has contributed to the prestige of the American, Canadian, and various European academies and we as American scholarly publishers also benefit from the intellectual contributions of these migrant scholars. However, this south-to-north migration pattern has inevitably resulted in an asymmetry of knowledge production, which privileges the academic contributions coming out of the Global North.

To move forward in a more ethical, culturally-responsive manner that is self-aware of global power dynamics, I propose creating scholarly marketing strategies that are accessible in multiple ways, and building relationships of collaboration with international publishers, particularly those in the Global South. It is essential to continue creating and publicizing open access content that bridges class divides as well as webinars and podcasts that engage audiences in creative ways. Publishing and publicizing  multilingual content and engaging in multilingual marketing strategies, particularly in the United States, where there is a growing demographic of Latin American migrants, can serve as a culturally-responsive strategy that will meet the needs of these communities. Furthermore, developing sustained collaborations with both academic and non-academic publishers in the Global South, especially those in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, should result in a multidirectional learning and exchanging of resources that breeds an international sense of solidarity in the face of challenges like this global pandemic, climate change, and worldwide social and economic injustice.

New Role for Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press

We are pleased to announce that Ken Wissoker, who has been Editorial Director at Duke University Press since 2005, will now serve as our Senior Executive Editor.  As we announced recently, he will be succeeded in his former role by Gisela Fosado, who will now be leading our Book Acquisitions team. As Senior Executive Editor, Wissoker will be moving on from departmental management responsibilities to focus his full attention on continuing to build his interdisciplinary list of titles and working with new and returning authors.

“Ken Wissoker is among the leading scholarly editors in the world and his impact on academic  publishing has been profound and far-reaching,” said Dean Smith, Director of Duke University Press. “Over the last three decades, his editorial vision has been indispensable to the success of Duke University Press. He will continue to thrive in this new role.” 

“I’m excited for Gisela’s leadership and for the Press’s future.  After more than twenty years as department chair, I’m welcoming this change, and happy to have more time to focus on authors and manuscripts,” Wissoker commented.

Wissoker joined the Press as an Acquisition Editor in 1991; became Editor-in-Chief in 1997; and was named Editorial Director in 2005. In addition to his duties at the Press, he serves as Director of Intellectual Publics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in New York City. He speaks regularly on publishing at universities in the US and around the world.

Wissoker has published over a thousand books that have won over 150 prizes. Among the authors whose books he has published are Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Achille Mbembe, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Charles Taylor, Elizabeth Povinelli, Lisa Lowe, Brian Massumi, Fred Moten, Chandra Mohanty, Christina Sharpe, Greg Tate, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Cherríe Moraga. In addition he has published the work of artists including Randy Weston, Horace Tapscott, Fred Wesley, Mira Schor, and Renée Green.

In the next year, Wissoker has new titles coming out by Jack Halberstam, Ian Baucom, Katherine McKittrick, artist Lorraine O’Grady, Lesley Stern, and a posthumous book by José Esteban Muñoz, among many others. He also contributes a chapter to the new edition of The Academic’s Handbook. 

Ken’s team includes Joshua Gutterman Tranen, who was recently promoted to Assistant Editor, and is now acquiring his own titles in  gender and sexuality studies, queer history, cultural studies, and anthropology. Wissoker is also assisted by Editorial Associate Kate Herman and by Editorial Associate Ryan Kendall, who started at the Press this winter.

Our esteemed Executive Editor Courtney Berger continues to acquire titles in disciplines ranging from political theory to American studies to native and indigenous studies. She is assisted by Assistant Editor Sandra Korn, who also acquires her own titles in Middle East studies and religion. Editor Elizabeth Ault acquires books in African Studies, Urban Studies, Middle East Studies, Geography, and Theory from the South, among other disciplines. Associate Editor Miriam Angress acquires books in religion, world history, women’s studies, and creative non-fiction and supervises the World and Latin America Reader series. Editorial Associate Alejandra Mejía will continue to work with Gisela Fosado in her new role. 

Together, the Books Acquisitions team brings in about 140 new titles per year that share the ideas of progressive thinkers and support emerging and vital fields of scholarship across the humanities and interpretive social sciences. 

Gisela Fosado Named Editorial Director of Duke University Press

Gisela de la Concepción Fosado has been named Editorial Director of Duke University Press after a nationwide search. As Editorial Director she will establish the editorial vision for the Press and set the overall direction for the Books Acquisitions team to ensure excellence across all subject areas. She will also play a major role in moving the Press to become an industry leader in cultivating and sustaining an inclusive organizational culture.

Ed Balleisen, Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University says, “As Duke University Press’s second century beckons, Gisela Fosado is exactly the right person to lead book acquisitions.  She brings distinctive talents, perspective, and expertise to the role—a remarkable intellectual curiosity about new directions in scholarship, wonderful instincts for publishing strategy, an impressive track record of national leadership on the issue of how academic presses can embrace diversity and inclusion, and the sort of vision and interpersonal skills to sustain excellence in career development throughout the book acquisitions team.”

Fosado has been with Duke University Press since 2010, acquiring books in a wide range of areas in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, American and Atlantic World history, gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity, African American and Africana studies, environmental studies, and Latin American and Latinx Studies. She has acquired both award-winning monographs and bestselling general interest titles for the Press, working with many prominent authors including Patricia Hill Collins, Renato Rosaldo, Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena, Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Enrique Dussel, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Barbara Weinstein, Gilbert M. Joseph, Laurent Dubois, Charles E. Cobb Jr., Margaret Randall, Lynn Stephen, Joanne Rappaport, and Ruth Behar.  She has also published posthumous books by Gloria Anzaldúa and C. L. R. James.

In the past several years, Fosado has co-led Duke University Press’s Equity and Inclusion Task Force, a staff-created effort that has encouraged press-wide training and conversation to help ensure all staff are valued and supported professionally at every level. She has also served on the AUPresses Diversity and Inclusion Task Force and facilitated AUPresses inclusion in the 2019 Lee and Low Diversity Survey. She will bring her strong commitment to inclusion and collaboration, and her skills in careful listening, supportive mentorship, and adaptive and responsive learning that she has built in that work to her role as Editorial Director.

Gisela Fosado says, “Being entrusted to lead books acquisitions at Duke University Press, and to build upon the bold and urgent work done by those before me, is the greatest honor of my life. Everything I know about publishing I learned through my brilliant, generous, and hard working colleagues at the Press.  I look forward to many more years of learning and collaboration.” 

Fosado holds an A.B. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. She began her career at Duke University Press as Editorial Associate in 2010. Before coming to the Press, she served as the Associate Director for the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Once an undocumented immigrant, Fosado will be the first Latinx leader of Duke University Press’s Books Editorial program.

Dean Smith, Director of Duke University Press says, “Gisela Fosado is an extremely talented publisher and a transformative leader who is helping to change the face of scholarly publishing with an expansive editorial vision and a fierce  commitment to equity and inclusion. She practices equity in all of her interactions and embodies our mission to effect positive change in the world. I look forward to working with her and to building on our legacy of introducing bold and innovative scholarship to a global audience.” 

About Duke University Press: Each year Duke University Press publishes about 140 new books, almost 60 journals and multiple digital collections that share the ideas of progressive thinkers and support emerging and vital fields of scholarship across the humanities and interpretive social sciences. It is also well known for its mathematics journals, sophisticated graphic design and integration of technology platforms.

The Best Books We Read in 2019

From literary fiction to graphic novels, we love to read at Duke University Press! In this post, our staff members share their favorite reads from the past year. We hope you enjoy their suggestions and maybe find a few gift ideas for the holiday season.

Courtney Baker, Book Designer, recommends Delores Phillips’s only novel: “The Darkest Child is a haunting, beautifully crafted story about love, loss, survival, and redemption. This story masterfully weaves together themes of mental health, racism, and poverty, and leaves you wishing there were 50 more chapters to know that it ‘all turns out okay,’ despite knowing the Quinn children will never, ever be okay. I could not put it down and finished it only days after starting it. It’s a difficult read, but worth every minute.”

Charles Brower, Senior Project Editor, recommends the winner of the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing: “My favorite nonfiction book of the year, hands down, is Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which starts as an investigation of a Belfast mother of ten’s disappearance in 1972 after being kidnapped in the middle of the night and dilates to become a history of the Troubles and some of its most striking personalities on all sides. It’s hugely informative but also as gripping and as full of memorable characters as any novel could be.”

Patty Chase, Digital Content Manager, recommends a writer’s yearlong experiment: “Ross Gay’s exquisite collection of short essays The Book of Delights delighted me repeatedly. I strive to express joy and gratitude in as wanton and unabashed a manner as Ross Gay has done in this book’s pages. In the world we live in, I think we could all use a little more delight. I’ll be keeping this book close.”

Jocelyn Dawson, Journals Marketing Manager, recommends two books: “This year I read both of Celeste Ng’s books, Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You. Ng’s characters are vividly drawn and the books have a quiet, muted tone but are so absorbing you won’t want to put them down. Highly recommended.”

Joel Luber, Assistant Managing Editor, recommends two graphic novels: “Two of my favorite books this year were the two most recent graphic novels from Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam and Are You Listening? Both books follow women on fantastical journeys—the first through space in flying fish rockets ships, the second across West Texas chasing magical cats—and ask, ‘Who is family?’ and ‘How are those bonds created?’ At the age of twenty-three, Walden has already written three full-length graphic novels and is the leading voice in a new generation of young graphic novelists who have grown up entirely outside the influence of the super-hero comic book industry. I’m looking forward to what she does next.”

Chris Robinson, Copywriter, recommends a work of historical fiction: “Out of all the books I read this year, the one that stayed with me the most after I finished it was A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. It’s a massive, sprawling novel that takes on Jamaican social and political history in the ’70s and ’80s—everything from the rise of Bob Marley, gangs, and national politics to the CIA’s covert operations in the Caribbean and Latin America, bauxite mining, and the crack epidemic in NYC in the ’80s. It’s not an easy read—it’s violent, and it teems with characters and unfamiliar slang, but it was so good it ruined the next couple novels I read.”

Dan Ruccia, Marketing Designer, recommends a sci-fi trilogy: “My favorite book(s) of the year were N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky). She’s a master world-builder, so these books brim with fantastic details that enrich the story. Her narrators are super-conversational, which seems so much like an exception in the fantasy realm. And I loved the way in which she twists and contorts narrative threads in entirely unexpected ways. I devoured all three books in a matter of weeks.”

Nancy Sampson, Production Coordinator, recommends a memoir: “I enjoyed a book from another small publisher called Bobby in Naziland by Robert Rosen. (Full disclosure, he’s a friend of mine.) Rosen applies his dark but sentimental sense of humor to tell tales from his childhood. Rosen shares how his perspective was influenced global and local historic moments during the mid-1950s while he and his family lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY.”

Danielle Thibault, Library Sales and Digital Access Coordinator, recommends a New York Times bestseller: “My favorite book I read this year was Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett. A woman in Florida inherits her father’s taxidermy business following his suicide. As her mother begins making lewd taxidermy sculptures and her brother completely withdraws, Jessa-Lynn is forced to grapple with the realization that she doesn’t really know her family. An Entertainment Weekly review called it ‘very Florida, very gay, and very good,’ and I agree!”

Erica Woods, Production Coordinator, recommends a mystery novel: “This year’s favorite for me was Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke. It’s a sequel to her 2017 bestseller Bluebird, Bluebird. Both are fantastic mysteries, yet the real beauty of Locke’s books is how she uses language to describe East Texas. You can’t help but be pulled into the actions and thoughts of Darren Matthews, her very flawed Texas Ranger, who’s trying to stop a race war in small town that barely exists on any map. Definitely go pick it up!”

Thanks to our staff for another year of great reads and recommendations! We look forward to expanding our collective literary minds in 2020.