Big Media!

How about a brief recap of the big media hits we enjoyed in 2017? Yes? Ok, then.

Peter Conners’s Cornell ’77 hit all the right notes for maximum media exposure – perfect timing with the 40^th anniversary, an eager audience of fans, and a serendipitous collaboration with Rhino. All of these factors, along with great teamwork at CUP, resulted in remarkable mainstream coverage in Rolling Stone, Spin, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Associated Press, Los Angeles Review of Books, Relix, Vice/Noisey, All About Jazz, and, of course, High Times.

Our other major Cornell-related title this year, Forever Faithful, made the media rounds on a more local circuit, but hit all the media mainstays – the Cornell Alumni Magazine, the Cornell Chronicle, and the Ithaca Journal. Most notably was the month-long serialization of the book in the Ithaca Journal. A feature on the book was on the front page on September 29^th, and excerpts were printed on the front page of the sports section on September 29^th, October 6^th, October 10^th, October 13^th, October 17^th, October 20^th, and October 24^th. They even made a short video on the book which we’ve included on the book’s webpage.

Other highlights include New York Times articles on Marisa Scheinfeld’s The Borscht Belt and Goodier and Pastorello’s Women Will Vote as well as an op-ed from Fran Quigley; J. C. Sharman’s The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management being reviewed in The Economist and The Financial Times; Mark de Rond’s excerpt in The Times (UK) magazine; Brandon Keim’s appearance on NPR’s Science Friday; Quartz’s feature on Fran Quigley’s Prescription for the People; Alex Posecznick and Charles Dorn in Inside Higher Ed; profiles on Felia Allum and Mark de Rond in Times Higher Education; and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution being reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

Saadia M. Pekkanen in Forbes

Saadia M. Pekkanen, editor of Asian Designs: Governance in the Contemporary World Order, published an article on Forbes.com on October 31: China and Japan Vie to Shape Asia’s Approach to Outer Space

White World Order, Black Power Politics Reviewed in the LRB

White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations by Robert Vitalis was reviewed by Susan Pederson in the October 20 issue of the London Review of Books: Destined to Disappear. Pederson writes: 

“Robert Vitalis wants his discipline to understand not only how central the category of race and the structures of racism were to its founding institutions and paradigms but also to see the erasure of that history not as progress but as repression, a willful forgetting that has if anything made it less equipped to comprehend (much less to address) the shocking racial inequities that still mark both the American and the global order. If international relations scholars want to understand the racial politics that made their field what it is today, there is no better place to begin than with this righteously angry book.”

Dara Kay Cohen in the Washington Post

Dara Kay Cohen, author of Rape during Civil War, coauthored an article on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog: Were 75 percent of Liberian women and girls raped? No. So why is the U.N. repeating that misleading ‘statistic’?

David Bacon on Truthout

David Bacon, author of Communities without Borders, published a photoessay on Truthout about homeless would-be voters in Berkeley, California: “We’re Homeless and We Vote”: Homeless People Want a Voice in This Election”

Press author Sara Danius in the news

Sara Danius, author of The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics, is the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan today  “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Bob Dylan wins 2016 Nobel Prize in literature—live updates from the Guardian 

Bob Dylan Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature (New York Times)

Marisa Scheinfeld Featured by Gothamist

Marisa Scheinfeld’s book The Borscht Belt is featured on Gothamist on October 10, 2016: This Is What the Abandoned Hotels of the Borscht Belt Look Like Now

Recent Award Winners

Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815 by Matt Erlin is the winner of the DAAD Book Prize (German Studies Association)

The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 by Paul Lerner is the winner of the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize (American Historical Association)

Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez is the winner of the Premio del Rey (American Historical Association)

The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland by Keely Stauter-Halsted is the winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize (American Historical Association)

Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa by Scott Straus is the winner of the Joseph S. Lepgold Book Prize (Georgetown University)

Robert J. Sternberg on How to Produce Students Who Can Change the World

A Q & A with Robert J. Sternberg was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled) on September 15. Dan Berrett of the Chronicle writes of Sternberg, “Over an extensive career, he has challenged orthodoxies on admissions, standardized testing, and academic culture. . . . In his new book, What Universities Can Be: A New Model for Preparing Students for Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership, Sternberg synthesizes his research and evolving thinking on intelligence, creativity, common sense, wisdom, and leadership. . . . He proposes a new model that prepares students for what he calls ‘active concerned citizenship and ethical leadership,’ or ‘Accel.’ That means emphasizing access over exclusivity, he says, and cultivating broad abilities, like creativity, wisdom, and practical thinking, instead of narrow ones like memory.”

A few short excerpts of the interview follow:

Launch of Cornell University Press content on UPSO

ITHACA, NY – Cornell University Press is pleased to announce it will be partnering with Oxford University Press to load its scholarly monograph content on the University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO) platform to take advantage of a fully enabled XML environment with the cutting-edge search and discovery functionality that has marked the ongoing success of Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO). The official launch date begins today and can be accessed at this link: http://cornell.universitypressscholarship.com.

Speaking on the launch of Cornell Scholarship Online, Dean Smith, the Press’s Director, said: “Cornell University Press is excited to join UPSO and benefit from an innovative model that offers new features for the reader and leverages a global approach to sales. We are honored to be among this prestigious group of publishers.”

Niko Pfund, President of Oxford University Press USA, added that “an alliance between Cornell University Press and OUP seems only natural. From Costa Rican birds to lessons for beekeepers, from books on Eastern European nationalism to colonial American life, Cornell’s program is tightly focused yet never predictable, and I’m delighted to welcome Cornell authors, books, and colleagues to the UPSO fold.”

University Presses Confront Piracy

Dean J. Smith, Director of Cornell University Press, is among the scholarly publishing leaders quoted in the April 12, 2016 article “Online Piracy of Academic Materials Extends to Scholarly Books” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. On March 31, Peter Berkery, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, notified the association’s members that thousands of university press books had been pirated and made available on websites that also feature more than a million books pirated from trade publishers. The article is available to Chronicle subscribers only, but here is an excerpt:

“University presses have become aware in recent weeks that unauthorized copies of hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of their books are available on pirate websites, and officials are still struggling with how to respond. Several press leaders said they wanted to be sure any stance they take against piracy isn’t perceived as an attack on the open-access movement, which is gaining popularity among some academics and librarians. ‘Many of these books are our best sellers,’ said Dean J. Smith, director of Cornell University Press. ‘This is really painful to a university press.'”

Cornell University Press Welcomes Emily Andrew

Cornell University Press is pleased to announce the appointment of Emily Andrew as senior acquisitions editor. Emily Andrew comes to Cornell University Press with two decades of experience in scholarly publishing, most recently at the University of British Columbia Press and, prior to that, at the University of Toronto Press. She also has worked in commercial publishing, as well as at a nonfiction literary agency.

Emily begins work at Cornell University Press at the beginning of July. She will be acquiring projects in areas that include military history, modern European history, Asian history, and law and society.

Throughout her publishing career Emily has acquired in a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, spanning the most abstract of literary studies to quantitative political science. Notable achievements include the establishment of a highly regarded series in military history that incorporates home front and battlefront, social history and operational history; acquiring and editing a collection of books probing the “democratic deficit” of public institutions and political participation;  and spearheading a cross-disciplinary series in disability studies.

“We are honored to have Emily Andrew join our editorial team,” said editor-in-chief Mahinder Kingra. “She brings with her a wealth of experience in publishing and tremendous insight into a wide range of scholarship. Throughout her career, she has shown herself to be remarkably fluent in academic discourse while also understanding the imperatives of publishing and how to use the highest standards of scholarly communication to reach a broad audience both within and beyond the academy.”

A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Emily also earned a degree in African American history from the University of Toronto.

In her spare time, she enjoys attending music festivals, watching her son play house league hockey, and eating well. She is currently reading Greg Grandin’s Bancroft Prize–winning book The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.

Please join us in welcoming Emily!

Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon on NPR

Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, author of For Fear of an Elective King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789, appeared on  NPR’s All Things Considered for Presidents Day. Listen here: Why President? How the U.S. Named Its Leader.

The New York Times on Bill Gates as Book Critic

In December, we noted that Bill Gates had chosen Eradication: Ridding the World of Diseases Forever? by Nancy Leys Stepan as one of his favorite books read in 2015. Katherine Rosman of the New York Times writes about Gates as literary tastemaker here:

Bill Gates: The Billionaire Book Critic

Nancy Mandeville Caciola in the Washington Post

Nancy Mandeville Caciola, author of Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages and Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, was interviewed by Fred Barbash of the Washington Post:

‘The Revenant’: What is that, besides a movie?

Bill Gates names Eradication one of “The Best Books I Read in 2015”

Eradication: Ridding the World of Diseases Forever? by Nancy Leys Stepan is one the six best books Bill Gates read in 2015. You can watch his video review of the book here. Gates writes on his blog:

“Stepan’s history of eradication efforts gives you a good sense of how involved the work can get, how many different kinds of approaches have been tried without success, and how much we’ve learned from our failures. She writes in a fairly academic style that may make it hard for non-experts to get to her valuable arguments, but it’s worth the effort. You come away from it with a clearer sense of how we can use the lessons of the past to guide future efforts to save lives.”

Marina Rustow named 2015 MacArthur Fellow

Congratulations to Marina Rustow, author of Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate, who has been named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow on the basis of her work with the Cairo Geniza texts. From the MacArthur Foundation’s description of Rustow’s work:

“In Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (2008), Rustow focuses on the period from 909 to 1171 C.E. and upends long-accepted ideas about the relationship between two rival Jewish communities under Fatimid rule. Prior historians, basing their interpretation on literary polemics, had depicted the Rabbanites and Karaites (or Qaraites) of Egypt and Syria as factions bitterly divided by theological difference, the latter branded as heretics and marginalized. Rustow examined nonliterary Geniza documents (such as letters, legal contracts, and state petitions and decrees) and revealed a wealth of social, economic, and political transactions between the two groups. The finding calls into question the depth of the religious schism, suggesting a higher level of tolerance and cooperation than had been assumed.”

Cornell University Press publishes The Inauguration of Elizabeth Garrett, Cornell’s Thirteenth President

The publication of The Inauguration of Elizabeth Garrett, Cornell’s Thirteenth President by Cornell University Press is featured in the Cornell Chronicle: Chapbook captures Garrett’s historic inauguration

Peter Del Tredici quoted in Harper’s

Peter Del Tredici, author of Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide, is quoted (speaking about the role of the New Jersey Turnpike in shaping its local ecosystem)  in Andrew Cockburn’s “Letter from Washington” in the September 2015 issue of Harper’s: Weed Whackers

Michael Khodarkovsky in the Wall Street Journal

The August 18 edition of the Wall Street Journal features a commentary on Putin’s Russia by Michael Khodarkovsky, author most recently of Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus:

Putin Creates a Fantasyland