Monthly Archives: August 2017

Nicole Mitchell Assumes Presidency of University Presses’ Association

Credit: Hayley Young

The University of Washington Press Director Begins Term as 2017–2018 President

NEW YORK (August 17, 2017) — The Director of the University of Washington Press, Nicole Mitchell, began her one-year term as President of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) on June 11, 2017. Mitchell assumed the role at AAUP 2017, the Association’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas. She is preceded by Darrin Pratt, Director of the University Press of Colorado.

As President, Mitchell looks forward to working with the Executive Director and Board of Directors on a number of organizational goals.  In Austin, she announced that she wanted to focus on three major areas during the coming year:  establishing a Diversity Task Force; forming a working group of non-US members to better understand the needs of international members; and, working with the Research Task Force to strengthen the case for the unique value and impact of university presses.

Nicole Mitchell has served as Director of the University of Washington Press since 2012.

Over the past five years, among other milestones, she has restructured the press, raised the press’s profile on the University of Washington campus and in the Seattle community, refreshed the press’s editorial program, and secured new funding for East Asian studies and work by Pacific Northwest writers.

“I am particularly proud of UW Press’s leadership role in establishing the Mellon-funded University Press Diversity Fellowship Program in partnership with Duke, Georgia, MIT, and the Association.  I am also excited to be collaborating with the University of British Columbia Press and First Nations communities on a new multimedia digital publishing initiative, also recently funded by the Mellon Foundation,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell has previously served the Association on the Professional Development Committee (including a term as chair in 2009-2010), the Task Force on University Relations, the Nominating Committee, and through a previous term of service on the Association’s Board of Directors.

Mitchell started her career in scholarly publishing in 1983 as a Graduate Trainee at Cambridge University Press and soon became the press’s first Children’s Book Editor, helping to create and launch the imprint Cambridge Books for Children.  Moving to the United States, she became the first full-time acquisitions editor at the University of Alabama Press (UAP). Seven years later, Mitchell was tapped to lead the press. During her tenure as director, she expanded Alabama’s publishing program, increasing sales by 50% and moving UAP from an AAUP Group 1 to Group 2 tier press.

In 2001, Mitchell was appointed Director of University of Georgia Press. During her ten years at Georgia, Mitchell led a staff of twenty-six, guiding the press’s editorial program as Editor in Chief, increasing sales, and establishing the press’s fundraising program by recruiting an influential Advisory Council.  Mitchell also served on executive committee of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, a pioneering state-focused, online-only encyclopedia.

Mitchell holds a joint honors degree in Art History and French from the University of Bristol and a certificate in Management from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

“It is a great honor for me to be serving this Association as President. I have spent my entire career in university press publishing and look forward to giving back and advocating for an association that supports and nurtures high-quality scholarly publishing around the globe,” said Mitchell.

About the Association of American University Presses: The Association of American University Presses is an organization of over 140 international nonprofit scholarly publishers. Since 1937, AAUP advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association holds integrity, diversity, stewardship, and intellectual freedom as core values. AAUP members are active across many scholarly disciplines, including the humanities, arts, and sciences, publish significant regional and literary work, and are innovators in the world of digital publishing.

About the University of Washington Press: Established in 1920, the University of Washington Press supports the research, education, and outreach missions of the University of Washington by publishing peer-reviewed scholarship for an international community of students, scholars, and intellectually curious readers. The press is known for groundbreaking lists in critical ethnic studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; Asian American studies; Asian studies; anthropology; art history and visual culture; environmental studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; and U.S. history, among other fields.

Q&A with ‘Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy’ author Geeta Patel

Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy traverses disparate and uncommon routes to explore how people grapple with the radical uncertainties of their lives. In this edgy, evocative journey through myriad interleaved engagements–including the political economies of cinema; the emergent shapes taken by insurance, debt, and mortgages; gender and sexuality; and domesticity and nationalism–author Geeta Patel demonstrates how science and technology ground our everyday intimacies. The result is a deeply poetic and philosophical exploration of the intricacies of techno-intimacy, revealing a complicated and absorbing narrative that challenges assumptions underlying our daily living.

Today we talk to the author about her book, publishing soon in our Feminist Technosciences series. 

What inspired you to get into your field?

Geeta Patel: I don’t have a field in any strict sense, although most of my friends now would think of me as a literary ‘type.’ I, however, don’t think of myself that way. I compose in visual metaphors, and the way I look at things askance, as though they were transparent and opaque at the same time, is as a scientist who loves poetry.

I grew up in a family full of women doctors, which along with the push toward science if you grew up in South Asia and had even a vestige of a brain, meant I ended up being saddled with science, specializing in the sciences from when I was eleven years old. But I loved all the sciences, particularly ‘the natural sciences’ with the kind of curiosity of many eighteenth-century scientists. In that period ‘scientific’ curiosity leaked out into more than what we would now call science. It embraced poetry, literary prose, questions of politics, the ways in which money and goods moved, finance, drawings, maps, and instruments. A sort of porous curiosity, rather than directed curiosity along blinkered pathways. Eighteenth-century journals, as well as the South Asian magazines of my childhood, had tidbits on science, poetry, politics, fiction, oddities from the ambit of the political, and off-kilter instruments of measurement. This is what I grew up reading and it is was as though they all belonged in the same place and together made sense.

So when I think of what my ‘field’ consists of, it lives at the cusp of all these things. Where more than one intellectual formation or terrain fades into each other, informs each other, pushes at each other, and inflects each other. And a field formation gets taken up in such a way that it makes an assumption in another field discomfiting. One such place I approach/broach that in Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy is the technology of time.

What would you have been if not an academic?

GP: Probably a health practitioner, a healer.

Why did you want to write this book?

GP: I wanted to sit with, ponder, think about, and ruminate on the places, moments, pauses, and sudden jolts where I stopped thinking. Where my capacity to envision something else failed me, felt as though it had faded from my grasp. Many intellectuals imagine this as the horizon towards which one ambles, gallops, or comes up against in some putative future. When I was writing my previous book on the Urdu poet Miraji, I came to see it as he had, and how the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had, as that which is inside what we think, visualize, do. The bedrock of belief lives where we come to a grinding halt, and we find ourselves in a double bind—facing what we must let go of, but can’t. How could we, following on Michel Foucault and Marcel Mauss, understand these as technologies that make us who we are, which are the armature of our very ordinary, everyday habits?

I also wanted to mess with what had come to be conventional ways of bringing intellectual fields together. I wanted to make that broaching or bridging awkward—and this is what I practice in Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy. What would chemistry do to transgender possibilities in South Asia? What would it mean to transmute the aesthetics of linear time to lay out the gatherings that took on the resistance to a film on sexuality? How would the historical congruencies between these events and the fights over insurance in the Indian parliament give us insights? Allow us to delve into the modes through which financing loss became the conduit to grapple with the political desires that undergird nationalism? In the process how would science emerge in writing about events that might, in some simple way, not be said to be scientific (in the ways we now see science)?

Who do you see as the audience for this book?

GP: Everyone, feminists, science studies aficionados, cultural studies scholars, media studies scholars, finance practitioners, political theorists, literary theorists. In India I have found the audience to include artists, film-makers, fiction writers, poets, and non-academics.

What is your next project?

GP: I have many ongoing projects. One is a book on Ismat Chughtai, in particular on two of her short stories. That book interrogates the lineages of historical realism in South Asia. It brings quantum and relativity as conduits through which I can grapple with the desires that readers ferry along with them as they read fiction and mine it for information. One is a book on 1950s and ‘60s billboards in Mumbai, and I look at what they reveal about advertising, fiscal fantasies, national sentiment, and nationalist aesthetics in post-colonial states. Another is about the long history of pensions and insurance in South Asia. One of the first of its chapters rethinks the eighteenth-century history of capitalism through colonial pensions.

Geeta Patel is associate professor of both Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures and of women, gender, and sexuality at the University of Virginia. She is author of Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, Colonialism, and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry.

August 2017 News, Reviews, and Events

News

UW Press publishes two (out of three) titles on the shortlist for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) Social Science Book Prize 2017 (Humanizing the Sacred by Azza Basarudin and Forests Are Gold by Pamela D. McElwee). Winners will be announced at the organization’s annual meeting in England from August 16-18, 2017. Congratulations to and fingers crossed for the finalists, editors, and all involved!

Monthly Giveaways

Reviews and Interviews

The Seattle Times features Waterway by David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and staff of HistoryLink (dist. for HistoryLink) and mentions Native Seattle by Coll Thrush in an article about the 100th anniversary celebrations for the Locks on July 4. The Wedgewood in Seattle History blog also features Waterway.


The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette features an op-ed by Bike Battles author James Longhurst.


The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reviews The Tao of Raven by Ernestine Hayes: “Artistic and honest and moving in a way few memoirs ever dare to match. . . . A seminal work in the making, and one that all Alaskans should make a point not to miss.”—Addley Fannin


General Aviation News reviews The Propeller under the Bed by Eileen A. Bjorkman: “Any aviation enthusiast will appreciate all 200 pages of this work, but those of us who find our fathers and mothers staring up at a cloudless sky when the sound of a propeller breaks the silence will recognize both its timeless appeal and historic significance.”—Mark Jones Jr.


The Seattle Times features The Hope of Another Spring by Barbara Johns in the Lit Life column: “A powerful new book. . . . The book is a beautiful display of Fujii’s work, and it’s proof of the power of art and artists to witness events many would rather leave in the dark.”—Mary Ann Gwinn

8Asians also reviews: “The gem of the book is the reproduction of Fujii’s diary. . . . The Hope of Another Spring offers an Issei artist’s perspective to our understanding of Japanese American’s wartime incarceration, while also bringing a valuable study of Fujii and his artistic journey and long career.”—Lily Wong


The Pacific Northwest Inlander features A Year Right Here by Jess Thomson: “The book is filled with evocative food descriptions and enviable trips, but also encompasses the uncontrollable stuff of everyday life and explores the limits of physical ability. . . . Thomson’s book encourages readers to be curious about their natural habitats in a new way. . . . An invitation to adventure anyone can embrace.”—Cara Strickland


Greg in San Diego blog reviews Birds of the Pacific Northwest by Tom Aversa, Richard Cannings, and Hal Opperman: “I believe this is the most useful regional field guide to the birds in the northwest corner of the contiguous United States.”—Greg Gillson


Western Birds, the journal of Western Field Ornithologists, also reviews the birding guide: “For the majority of serious birders in the West who tend to limit their explorations to one or another state or province, this guide should expand their horizons and encourage more cross-border birding. . . . This guide is an essential reference for birders west of the continental divide, particularly for intermediate and advanced observers.”—Eugene Hunn


TrailBlazerGirl.com reviews Seattle Walks by David B. Williams: “Not your typical tourist guide book. . . . Seattle Walks is an excellent guide to help you experience Seattle in a new way.”


KCTS 9 Borders & Heritage mentions Signs of Home by Barbara Johns in a segment and article about the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066.


UW Today features news from the College of Arts & Sciences that the family of video art pioneer Doris Chase have donated 59 of her works to the Henry. We published a book about the artist, Doris Chase, Artist in Motion by Patricia Failing, in 1992.


TrailblazerGirl.com reviews Hiking Washington’s History and Walking Washington’s History by Judy Bentley: “Enhance your exploration of the Evergreen State with Judy Bentley’s books.”


Plant Science Bulletin reviews Timber Trees of Suriname by Chequita R. Bhikhi (dist. for LM Publishers): “Timber Trees of Suriname will be very useful for foresters and, as a first introduction to the rich tree flora of Suriname, for all botanists, ecologists, and amateurs interested in flora of the Guiana Shield.”—Marcel Rejmánek


The HOME — So Different, So Appealing exhibit is on view at LACMA through October 15, 2017. We will distribute the accompanying catalogue—edited by curators Chon A. Noriega, Mari Carmen Ramirez, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas—for UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press. The exhibit gets mentions at ARTnews and Cuban Art News, and a review in the New Yorker: “’Home – So Different, So Appealing’ is a big, keen show. . . . It tells many stories and is a story in itself.”—Peter Schjeldahl

The exhibit also gets a review in the Los Angeles Times: “If ‘Home’ is a harbinger of what to expect for the rest of the series, it has set the bar high.”—Carolina A. Miranda


KEXP’s KEXPlorer posts an audio recording of an April 2017 panel discussion at the Wing Luke Museum on “Feminism and war in the Asia Pacific” program with Cindy Domingo (coeditor of A Time to Rise; October 2017).


KEXP’s Mind Over Matters Sustainability Segment interviews Unlikely Alliances author Zoltán Grossman. WORT’s A Public Affair (Madison, WI) will also interview the author live on August 11, 2017.


Greg Robinson of Nichi Bei mentions No-No Boy by John Okada in his latest weekly column.


The Now & Then column of Pacific NW Magazine features Frederick L. Brown and The City Is More Than Human. Paul Dorpat’s blog features an expanded version of the column.


TrailblazerGirl.com reviews Haida Gwaii by Dennis Horwood:”For a comprehensive guide to one of National Geographic’s 20 Best Trips, check out Haida Gwaii.”


DCist features Carlos Bulosan and America Is in the Heart in an article about this weekend’s Smithsonian Asian American Literature Festival, as well as their weekend events round-up. The Festival features a two-day reading of Bulosan’s book and Troubling Borders editor Isabelle Thuy Pelaud will also be participating.


The Science magazine podcast features an interview with Smell Detectives author Melanie Kiechle. The American Scholar’s Smarty Pants podcast also interviews the author.


Not Another Sports Show podcast (#NASSRadio) interviews Playing While White author David J. Leonard.

New Books

Razor Clams: Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest
By David Berger

In this lively history and celebration of the Pacific razor clam, David Berger shares with us his love affair with the glossy, gold-colored Siliqua patula and gets into the nitty-gritty of how to dig, clean, and cook them using his favorite recipes. In the course of his investigation, Berger brings to light the long history of razor clamming as a subsistence, commercial, and recreational activity, and shows the ways it has helped shape both the identity and the psyche of the Pacific Northwest.

Waterway: The Story of Seattle’s Locks and Ship Canal
By David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and Staff of HistoryLink
Distributed for HistoryLink

Why does a city surrounded by water need another waterway? Find out what drove Seattle’s civic leaders to pursue the dream of a Lake Washington Ship Canal for more than sixty years and what role it has played in the region’s development over the past century. Historians Jennifer Ott and David B. Williams, author of Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography, explore how industry, transportation, and the very character of the city and surrounding region developed in response to the economic and environmental changes brought by Seattle’s canal and locks.


Picturing India: People, Places, and the World of the East India Company
By John McAleer
Published with British Library

Few historians have considered the visual sources that survive from the British engagement with India and what they tell us about the link between images and empire, pictures and power. This book draws on the unrivaled riches of the British Library — both visual and textual — to tell that history. It weaves together the story of individual images, their creators, and the people and events they depict. And, in doing so, it presents a detailed picture of the Company and its complex relationship with India, its people and cultures.

Events

AUGUST

August 4 at 7 p.m., Ernestine Hayes, The Tao of Raven, Alaska State Library, Summer Lecture Series at the APK, Juneau, AK

August 5 at 11 a.m., Jess Thomson, A Year Right Here, Bear Pond Books, Stowe, VT

August 7 at 7 p.m., David B. Williams, Seattle Walks, King County Library Services – Renton Highlands, Renton, WA

August 11 at 7 p.m., Zoltán Grossman, Unlikely Alliances, A Room of One’s Own, Madison, WI

August 15 at 7 p.m., Judy Bentley, Walking Washington’s History, King County Library System – Lake Forest Park, Lake Forest Park, WA

August 15 at 7 p.m., David B. Williams, Seattle Walks, Co-presented with Capitol Hill Historical Society and Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

August 30 at 7 p.m., Kathleen Alcalá, The Deepest Roots, Third Place Book Club hosted by Seattle7Writers (Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff), Seattle, WA

August 31 at 7 p.m., David B. Williams, Seattle Walks, with Kevin O’Brien, Third Place Books, Seward Park, Seattle, WA

SEPTEMBER

September 7 at 7 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, University Book Store, Seattle, WA

September 7 at 7:30 p.m., David Leonard, Playing While White, BookPeople, Moscow, ID

September 9 from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. (Multi-author signing from 1 – 2 p.m.), Readerfest with Kathleen Alcalá, The Deepest Roots, The Brig & Ampitheater at Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA

September 12 at 6 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Sno-Isle Libraries, Mountlake Terrace Library, Mountlake Terrace, WA

September 13 at 7 p.m., Barbara Johns, The Hope of Another Spring, in conversation with Tom Ikeda, Seattle Public Library – Central Library with Elliott Bay Book Company and Denshō, Seattle, WA

September 13 at 7:30 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Olympia Timberland Library, Olympia, WA

September 16 at 2 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Humanities Washington, Sno-Isle Libraries, Stanwood Library, Stanwood, WA

September 16 at 2 p.m., William Wei, Asians in Colorado, Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, Colorado Springs, CO

September 19 at 7 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Wheelock Library, Tacoma, WA

September 20 at 6:30 p.m., David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and staff of HistoryLink, Waterway, MOHAI, History Café, Seattle, WA

September 20 at 7 p.m., Barbara Johns, The Hope of Another Spring, Friends of Mukai at the Vashon Land Trust building, Vashon Island, WA

September 21 at 7 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Eagle Harbor Books, Bainbridge Island, WA

September 23 at 11 a.m., David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and staff of HistoryLink, Waterway, King County Library System – Newcastle, Newcastle, WA

September 23 at 11 a.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Aberdeen Timberland Library, Aberdeen, WA

September 23 at 2 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Westport Timberland Library, Westport, WA

September 23 at 7 p.m., David Leonard, Playing While White, Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA

September 29 at 7 p.m., David Leonard, Playing While White, Elliott Bay Books, Seattle, WA

September 30 at 2 p.m., Judy Bentley, Walking Washington’s History, Timberland Regional Library – Olympia, Olympia, WA

September 30 at 2 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum, Ilwaco, WA

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