Category Archives: AUPresses

University Press Week | #NextUP: Phinney Books

On this final day of University Press Week, we are delighted to showcase Phinney Books, a Seattle neighborhood bookstore known for its careful selection of titles and expertly curated subscription program. Phinney Books serves a community of wide-ranging readers and is a valued promoter of UW Press books and university presses in general. Read our Q&A with owner Tom Nissley to learn more about Phinney Books and its customers and what’s next up for the bookstore.

How do you see university presses fit into the larger publishing world?

Through the bookstore, I see the trade side of university publishing, and I love to see their qualities of authority and care for scholarship and (relative) indifference to the market turned toward publishing for general readers. In the case of UW Press (and Washington State and Oregon State), that’s often done through publishing about the Northwest, a subject of great appeal to our customers. I’m always delighted to see the new catalogs from the “national” university presses as well (and to talk about them with our wonderful sales reps) and to find out what they are publishing next with their usual rigor and imagination. Every season there are books that we know will have a significant audience but that would not otherwise find a publishing home outside a university press.

What are Phinney Books customers reading these days?

Our customers always impress me with their appetite for translated literature and meaty books on history, politics, and nature. They are trying all the books by new Nobel laureate (and store favorite) Annie Ernaux, and reading about mushrooms and Greek myths and Vikings. From UW Press, our perennial favorite is David B. Williams, our best Northwest historian, whose last three books, Too High and Too Steep, Seattle Walks, and Homewaters, have each been bestsellers for us. This season we’ve had many readers coming in asking for Megan Asaka’s new history of migrant workers in our city’s early years, Seattle from the Margins. And every once in a while, a happy customer walks out the door with one of the most beautiful books in the store, the exquisite three-volume Fishes of the Salish Sea set.

Dark-haired woman reading on a bench in front of a bookstore. Signs on the bookstore read "Phinney Books" and "BOOKS" in neon lights.

Can you recall a memorable event with a university press author?

We do very few events, almost always for neighborhood authors—many of whom are customers as well—but one of my favorites was when a sister and brother, food writer and memoirist Jess Thomson and Reed professor of history and environmental studies Joshua Howe, both had new books out from UW Press: Jess’s memoir A Year Right Here and Joshua’s documentary collection, Making Climate Change History. I loved their mutual respect for each other’s very different work, and the affection and intuitive, slightly rivalrous connection that only siblings could share. It was a special night.

Beyond events, are there other ways that you have found success when collaborating with publishers?

One of my favorite collaborations with a publisher took place behind the scenes: over the years, I got to know—almost entirely through his outreach—Andrew Berzanskis [former senior acquisitions editor at UW Press], who just moved on to become the editorial director at the University of Oklahoma Press. He was always curious to hear our frontline perspective on readers and bookselling, and I got to get a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of the long-term process by which books are made.

When it comes to reaching readers, Phinney Books has been particularly forward thinking—from one of the best bookstore newsletters around to your subscription program, Phinney by Post. What’s on the horizon? Any new or upcoming programs you are particularly excited about?

Thanks for the kind words! For the most part we are busy enough with what we have going on already that we don’t have much chance to look beyond it, but we are delighted that this month we’re bringing back one of our favorite traditions, the Holiday Bookfest at the nearby Phinney Neighborhood Association, with two dozen authors (including David B. Williams and Oregon State University Press author Jessica Gigot) signing books on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. And we always love to keep spreading the word about Phinney by Post, one of the few subscription programs we know of that focuses on backlist books (“lost classics” that we think our subscribers don’t know about but will love). After eight years of the program, we look forward to celebrating our 100th selection next year. Past selections have included such university press books as Janet Lewis’s The Wife of Martin Guerre (Ohio), Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur (Minnesota), Carolyn See’s Golden Days (California), Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon), N. Scott Momaday’s The Names (Arizona), Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Virginia), and Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way (Chicago).

This post is part of the 2022 University Press Week blog tour hosted by the Association of University Presses. This year’s theme is #NextUP, reflecting the spirit of constant learning, adaptation, and evolution within scholarly publishing. Read more about UP Week and all of the featured books and blog posts here.

University Press Week | #NextUP: Q&A with Editors of the Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral Series

Continuing our celebration of University Press Week, today we’re highlighting our new series, Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral. We are thrilled to be publishing this timely series that reflects the activist orientation of abolition and highlights abolitionist creative practices that explore radical worlds beyond policing and prisons. Read our Q&A with the series editors, Michael Roy Hames García and Micol Seigel, to learn more.

What is your vision for the series?

In the wake of the movement for Black lives, and especially since 2020, academic and popular interest in abolition has flourished. As the first university press series on the subject, Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral will respond to and, we hope, shape that interest. This series will highlight academic texts across the humanities and social sciences, bringing them together so as to make more visible the larger conversation of which they are a part. Rather than understanding abolitionism as a recipe to be followed dogmatically, we see abolition as a set of open-ended questions to be asked generously in response to the conditions of a radically unjust and unfree world.

Abolitionist visions advocate for decarceration, defunding of police and prisons, and removal of the criminal legal system from people’s lives. Abolitionism is also a creative practice that entails discovering, developing, and promoting alternatives to policing and prisons such as mutual aid associations, restorative justice processes, and nonviolent approaches to personal and community safety. What might a more free and more just world look like? How might it develop? What stands in the way of its emergence? What possible relationships might this future have to present-day criminal justice reform? Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral will offer a forum to scholars and activists continuing to pose these generative questions and more.

Who is the series for?

This series will offer a platform for the groundswell of recent work that has explored abolition in its myriad implications, centered in interdisciplinary fields such as American studies, geography, and critical ethnic studies. Perhaps books under its auspices might take up some of the keywords in this emerging field: abolition, abolition democracy, carcerality, care, collateral consequences, communal luxury, emancipation, freedom, justice, racial capitalism, social harm, and the human.

Books will speak to audiences of scholars, students, general readers, and activists with accessible prose and urgent topics, including but not limited to local policing, campus policing, family policing (child welfare systems), e-carceration and electronic monitoring, sur- and sousveillance, crimmigration and border enforcement, race and racialization, antiblackness, settler colonialism, anticarceral feminisms, involuntary medical confinement, and organizing for abolitionist reforms.

In what ways does the series engage with past and present traditions of abolitionism?

The words abolition, abolitionism, and abolitionist are most widely associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements in Europe and the Americas to end the systems of racialized enslavement—specifically, although not exclusively, of people of African descent—that evolved in tandem with the European conquest and colonization of Africa and the Americas. Contemporary uses of abolition either translate the term from slavery to a superficially unrelated context (as in the abolition of nuclear weapons) or argue that a context is structurally related to, or even an extension of, slavery (as in prison abolition). This series emerges from the latter tradition, extending the intellectual and political vision of abolitionism in order to continue the unfinished work of emancipation in the twenty-first century.

Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral thus understands this strain of contemporary abolitionism to be constitutively both antiracist and antiprison. Its intellectual genealogy includes the groundbreaking 1971 anthology If They Come in the Morning, edited by Angela Y. Davis with the collaboration of Bettina Aptheker (reissued by Verso Books in 2016) as well as more recent volumes on prisons by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Joy James, Dylan Rodriguez, and the Critical Resistance Publications Collective. Such authors follow skeins of antiblackness through sequential, overlapping systems of racialized labor from African chattel slavery to black codes, convict leasing, chain gangs, Jim Crow and mass incarceration, now acquiring digital forms.

The centrality of antiracism to this tradition distinguishes it from other critiques of the prison such as Michel Foucault’s 1975 book Discipline and Punish, although such critiques have been profoundly important for many abolitionists. Observing the failures of postwar civil rights movements to advance anti-racism through state policy, abolitionist thought is skeptical of the state, even in its welfare mode, understanding the ways belonging and citizenship are made available to some at the expense of others. It therefore embraces a relational analysis, an understanding of how vectors of disadvantage intersect, and the confidence that global currents and transnational networks shape all local phenomena. Abolitionist scholarship is necessarily interdisciplinary because its object of study literally refuses to remain disciplined. It is thus among the swiftest-moving, most daring and sophisticated fields of study in the academy today.

Carceral studies stretch the abolitionist project beyond the prison to consider all forms of carceral space. How might future books in the series approach carcerality in this context?

Carcerality helps point to confinement and surveillance as mechanisms for the production and maintenance of racialized inequality in U.S. society. The United States maintains the largest prison population in the world, both as a percentage of its population and in terms of absolute numbers. The social impact of prisons, however, is augmented by law enforcement, courts, and reentry policies; supplemented by video surveillance and other forms of electronic monitoring; and supported overall by ideological investments, systems of knowledge, and institutions far outside of prison walls.

As of 2019, 6.3 million adults in the United States were on probation, on parole, in state or federal prison, or in a local jail—approximately the population of Los Angeles and Chicago, combined. This number does not include children, people in federal immigration detention centers, those confined by electronic monitors to the prisons of their homes, or those in any number of other conditions that remove personal liberty at the direction of the state.

Well beyond the prison itself, recent scholarship in critical prison studies has identified roots and branches of the carceral in a range of repressive state apparatuses. Courts, hospitals, immigration systems, the military, police agencies, private police, schools and universities, and social welfare agencies devoted to matters such as child protection, public health, housing, and unemployment are all mutually reinforcing with—if not mutually constitutive of—prisons and jails. From an abolitionist perspective, the future of such systems and structures must be put into question to the extent that they support a profoundly unequal society by depriving oppressed and exploited people of their freedom.

What should authors do if they are interested in submitting to the series?

We welcome proposals for books across disciplines, from scholarly monographs, edited collections, and compelling nonfiction works written for a more general readership. Authors may be grounded in fields such as American studies, geography, history, and critical ethnic studies. Interested authors can contact either one of us or send questions/queries to UW Press acquisitions editor, Mike Baccam, at mbaccam@uw.edu.

About the Series Editors

Michael Roy Hames-García is a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice. He previously taught at the University of Oregon and served on the City of Eugene’s Civilian Review Board, overseeing investigations into allegations of misconduct and uses of force by the Eugene Police Department.

Micol Seigel is a professor of American studies and history at Indiana University and author of Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. In addition to research and teaching, Micol is involved in the Critical Prison Studies caucus of the American Studies Association and the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas.

University Press Week | #NextUP: Jordan Biro Walters, author of Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico

In celebration of University Press Week, we are delighted to feature Jordan Biro Walters, associate professor of history at the College of Wooster and a first-time university press author. Her book, Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico, is forthcoming January 2023. Read our Q&A with Jordan to learn more about the book, her experience as a new author, and how working with a university press has benefitted her work.

Why publish with a university press?

Because Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico is the first comprehensive study of queer lives in the twentieth-century American Southwest, a virtually unexplored region in LGBTQ+ history, I only had a small research trail to follow when I started the project. Interest in sexuality, specifically the LGBTQ+ past in American West history, is recent. My collaboration with the University of Washington Press—well-known for works in American history, visual culture, critical ethnic studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and women, gender, and sexuality—allowed me to contextualize Wide-Open Desert for scholars in these disciplines. Additionally, I worked closely with UW Press to share the stories of Pueblo, Navajo, Nuevomexicanx, and white LGBTQ+ people with a general audience.

Covering more than seventy years of New Mexican history, the book brings together the narratives of queer mobility and cultural productions to think about their relevance to sexual politics and gay liberation activism. In anticipation of the book’s release, I’ve heard from scholars interested in purchasing the book to explore interrelated themes in their own research, such as women’s friendship and intimacy in 1940s modernist circles. Additionally, a documentarian contacted me wanting oral histories to make a film about Claude’s, a bohemian bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico known for its regular crowds of gay and lesbian artists in the early 1950s and through the 1960s. Publishing with a university press was important in giving my work visibility among these different audiences.

Tell us more about your experiences working with a university press.

It takes many hands to make a book. As a first-time author, I greatly benefited from the guidance of a team of people who assisted with developing, copy editing, designing, and marketing my book. In particular, [editorial director] Larin McLaughlin and editorial assistant Caroline Hall helped me manage copyright permissions. The queer history of New Mexico is scattered in various archives, unpublished personal narratives, private visual queer representations, and people’s memories. Part of this project was to create a composite portrait of queer lives, grounded in archival and oral research, that will serve as a starting point for others. UW Press helped me to navigate the copyright process. A few images I wanted to include in the book, especially the cover image, proved difficult to track down the necessary permissions. While securing copyright falls on the author’s shoulders, Larin and Caroline offered guidance on how to proceed when I hit a roadblock. It was important to me to start my book (the cover) with queer women who have long been overshadowed by works about men. This book begins with queer women’s voices and from there highlights people who possessed a wide range of desires, sexual subjectivities, and gender variance. A university press’s familiarity with the scholarly process enabled me to use all the materials I collected as fully as possible.

How do you see university press publishing as helpful to your work and career? What are your thoughts on the university press community as a whole?

Scholarly presses serve a public good by producing trustworthy sources of information by experts who aim to bring their intellectual expertise to expand people’s ways of thinking and solve modern injustices. They take risks in publishing cutting edge ideas. Academic theory, in conjunction with community activism, eventually seeps into mainstream culture and has a tremendous effect on the way people think and talk. As a short example, the term nonbinary, conceptualized by activists and queer theorists in the 1990s, is now used by many ordinary people to self-identify. Wide-Open Desert contributes to a body of scholarship that shows that queer, nonbinary, and trans identified folks have always been here, even though people used different terms to describe themselves. They embraced innovative ways to survive and thrive. My work argues that queer people contributed substantially to making Santa Fe the third largest art market in the United States. Creative centers, like large cities, inspired queer people to move, place-make, and unleash their creativity. Over several decades, both subtle and explicit queer cultural production opened sexual discourse, which served as a foundation for the later triumphs of the modern gay liberation movement.

Was there a particularly significant book that influenced your own?

I read Andrew J. Jolivétte’s (Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Louisiana) Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community [published by UW Press in 2016]. The book explores the HIV epidemic among, gay, two-spirit, and transgender Native people who also identify as mixed race. Jolivette’s succinct chapters address structural risk factors, particularly the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, and the final chapter offers a solution—implementation of intergenerational healing and cultural leadership. Indian Blood influenced me to work with UW Press. It made me rethink university presses, which I conceived of as producing lengthy and dense academic works for specialists. I was impressed by the readability and short length. My own book also centers two-spirit history and interrogates colonialism. Similar to Jolivette, I show the harm of settler colonialism through the suppression of two-spirit roles. At the same time, queer Native artists pushed back through artistic and cultural survival tactics. Particularly for historically underrepresented communities who were often shut out of formalized political structures, creative expression served as an arena for activism. The geographical and cultural borderlands of the American Southwest afford scholars an opportunity to better understand both the exclusion and flourishing of racially diverse queer representations outside of gay meccas. New Mexico has a long queer history and remains a center of queer creativity.

What Prisoners Tell Us: The Making of Concrete Mama

Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla, by Ethan Hoffman and John McCoy, won the Washington State Book Award in 1981 for its stark, sympathetic portrayal of life inside the maximum-security prison. The University of Washington Press is publishing a new edition of the book, long out of print but as relevant as ever.

McCoy was recently interviewed by prison scholar Dan Berger, who wrote the book’s new introduction, in Berger’s class at the University of Washington Bothell. For University Press Week, here are some edited highlights from the interview about our neighbors behind bars.

DAN BERGER: Why did you decide to write about the prison?

JOHN MCCOY: My first glimpse of the penitentiary was as a cub newspaper reporter at the Walla Walla Union Bulletin. At that time—this was 1977—the State Penitentiary was ending a reform experiment in which prisoners were allowed a fair amount of autonomy inside the walls and allowed outside furloughs. The theory was that the more contact that prisoners have with the outside world, the better the chances are that they can be safely returned to society. But this reform project was failing. I wondered why.

So you and Ethan Hoffman, a photographer at the paper, quit your newspaper jobs to do a book on the penitentiary?

The guard in 9-tower, his rifle ready, watches as new prisoners arrive “on the chain,” a bus that carries them shackled from the state corrections reception center in Shelton.

Yes. Ethan and I spent four months in the fall and winter of 1978-79 inside the prison. We were allowed to come in as early as 5:00 in the morning and stay as late as 10:00 p.m. We were unescorted, which was absolutely crucial. If we walked around with a guard, we were not going to get any information from prisoners. Then, towards the end of our time there, we spent some time with guards, which was interesting, because some prisoners who had talked to us earlier ceased talking to us. It’s a very polarized world inside prison.

How did you approach doing the book?

As journalists. Ethan and I were not prison experts. We simply wanted to photograph and report on what we saw inside the walls. Here’s what prisoners tell us. Here’s what their day-to-day life is like depending on whether they’re tough or vulnerable, men or women, black, white, or brown. Here’s what the Parole Board members say. Here’s what the warden says. Here’s the guards.

Besides the warden, did you have to talk to others to get access?

Not to get access—but politically, I had to talk to the head of the guards’ union and the prisoners who served on the Resident Council, the elected representatives of the general population.

One thing that helped pave our way with prisoners was Ethan’s decision to give anyone who asked a nice 8-by-10-inch black-and-white portrait photo of themselves. So Ethan had guys posing with weights, stripped to the waist, displaying all their tattoos. He took pictures of whatever they wanted, but one picture only. And in return, they signed a release form that said we could use these pictures in the book. Ethan spent a lot of nights in the darkroom because prisoners wanted quick results. Nonetheless, the decision created a lot of goodwill and gave us great access.

Kim, right, spends time with Leomy, his “inside lady” and a member of Men Against Sexism, a club popular with prison gays and queens.

At this time, there were all kinds of areas that were off limits to guards. So, in order to enter these areas, we had to have either the president of the Lifers’ Club, or the Chicano Club, or the Meditation Group, or Men Against Sexism, or some other prison leader, either accompany or approve us. We had to tread cautiously. If we got crosswise with any particular group, we would be out of there, or we could have caused harm to ourselves. There were certainly some tense situations with both prisoners and guards.

Could you describe an average day in those four months you were there?

Prisoners were locked in their cells overnight. The day began with morning chow, about 7:00, for the general population—those not confined in the segregation unit or in protective custody.

Prisoners were released by tiers and walked to the chow hall—an ugly, cold brick building with a lot of cold metal tables and metal serving trays. Sometimes there were fights in the chow hall, or food was thrown, and guards intervened.

Some prisoners spend hours playing dominoes in the black prisoners’ club room.

After chow, most prisoners had nothing to do. There were certainly not enough jobs to employ even a minority of the 1,400 prisoners. So they were free to go back to their cells or wander the breezeways. There was recreation time in the gym, the weight room, and the Big Yard, where prisoners played baseball, card games, and smoked weed. On occasion, the bikers were permitted to race their motorcycles around the inside perimeter. There was also a limited education program—which soon ended when the Legislature withdrew funding—in which prisoners could complete their GED or get community college credits or university credits. Occasionally, there were movies or shows in the auditorium.

Some prisoners hung out at their private club rooms. Although you could get an infraction for smoking weed, it was basically tolerated. And there was heroin and other drugs smuggled in from outside.

You could work if you could find a job in the kitchen, chow hall, laundry, license plate shop, or elsewhere. Pay was pitiful—a few cents an hour. The primary advantage of a job was access to things you could steal and then exchange or sell.

Lockup in the evening came early, right after dinner, unless you had a permit to be out for work or prison business.

Because most of the population spent most of their time in four-man, 10-by-12-foot cells, your cellmates were very important. The Resident Council ostensibly helped prisoners find compatible cellmates. But there were powerful guys in the prison who really controlled the cells. Often, you had to buy a cell. Sometimes you’d get a cell equipped with a television, a nice mattress, and so on, but you paid for that. And you paid for that with money, drugs, sex, cigarettes, pruno—which is prison-brewed liquor—or other things.

What did you expect to find at the prison and did you find it?

First of all, we knew it was a good and unexpected story. Look, these guys are in motorcycle gangs, and they’re in prison, and they’re racing their Harleys? We knew Ethan could get fabulous pictures. I mean, a sweat lodge—I’d never been to a sweat lodge before, and certainly not one inside a prison. A casino night at the Chicano Club. There were transgender or cross-dressing dancers. There was sex, there was drugs. So, without making a judgment call, we had to ask: What’s happening here? And why?

“Nert,” left, and “Kickstand” are bikers, cellmates and tattoo enthusiasts.

Our hope was to do a fair, balanced, and accurate account of life inside a state penitentiary—a notorious state penitentiary, perhaps—at a time in which hard questions continued to be asked about the purpose of prison.

How do you know you got at the truth?

Ethan had it easier, because photos don’t lie. I had to pursue multiple sources. Sometimes I heard prisoners explain their crimes and protest their innocence in ways that were preposterous. Fortunately, a helpful prison trustee was willing to share confidential records with me. And a prison attorney was quietly willing to access court records for me. I was able to verify prison stories and eventually developed a pretty good BS detector.

How did the experience of those four months in the prison affect you?

I went away humbled by the experience. I left with the strong feeling that this is really a destructive place. It’s destructive for those who are there, both keepers and the kept. It’s dangerous. It does little to help people adjust to the real world. In fact, it destroys a lot of prisoners’ chances of having a successful transition.

And it picks on the poor, the less educated, and the mentally ill. Incarcerated people are disproportionally poor and minorities. They have unaddressed behavioral issues; learning issues; addiction issues. Their keepers, at Walla Walla and prisons elsewhere, tend to be disproportionally white, rural, with a high school education, often veterans, and with limited understanding of those they are charged with “correcting.”

Why is Concrete Mama relevant 40 years later?

Ed Mead, a founder of the radical George Jackson Brigade and a Marxist revolutionary serving time for armed assault on a bank, is confined to the “intensive segregation unit” commonly known as “the hole.”

For two reasons: First, prison life doesn’t change much. Prisoners spend most of their time caged. They have little to do. They band together for protection and personal gain. And they generally leave prison more alienated and damaged than when they came in. As a result, two-thirds of them return.

Secondly, starting in the early 1970s, Washington State had tried to reform its prisons by emphasizing rehabilitation rather than punishment. That meant giving prisoners a good deal of autonomy with the expectation that if they could make something of themselves inside, they could be successful on the outside. For a variety reasons, it was a failure. Ethan and I were there as the experiment finally fell apart. But you have to ask, what have we done since?

John A. McCoy is the author of A Still and Quiet Conscience, a biography of Seattle Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen. He was a reporter and editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Walla Walla Union-Bulletin and has taught writing courses at the University of Washington-Tacoma and Seattle University.

Dan Berger is associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell, and an interdisciplinary historian focusing on critical prison studies. He is the author of several books, including Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, and coauthor most recently of Rethinking the American Prison Movement.

To learn more about Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla or to buy your copy of the book, click here.

Announcing the 2018–2019 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellows

SEATTLE, WA — The University of Washington Press, the MIT Press, Duke University Press, the University of Georgia Press, and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) today announce the recipients of the 2018–2019 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowships.

The Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowship was established in 2016 by the four university presses and the AUPresses as the first cross-press initiative of its kind in the United States to address the marked lack of diversity in the academic publishing industry. The initiative seeks to create a pipeline program of academic publishing professionals with significant personal experience and engagement with diverse communities and a demonstrated ability to bring the understanding gleaned from such engagement to bear on their daily work.

The program provides professional and financial support to cohorts of four fellows per year for three years. The yearlong appointments offer each fellow immersive, on-the-job training along with one-on-one mentoring and opportunities for networking and professional development. Fellows are given the opportunity to connect with one another and meet industry colleagues at two AUPresses annual meetings. Please join us in welcoming the 2018–2019 fellows!

The 2018–2019 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellows:

Caitlin Tyler-Richards joins the University of Washington Press from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is a PhD candidate in African history. Her research focuses on recentering Africa in book history, world literature, and popular fiction scholarship. Towards that end, her dissertation is a born-digital project on the shape of local and transnational fiction networks in Nigeria from 1945 to the present. She also enjoys speculative fiction from the global South, action movies featuring impossible white men, and defining “digital humanities.” Until recently, she lived in Missoula, Montana, with her partner and two dogs.

Jenny Tan joins Duke University Press from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently completing her PhD in comparative literature and medieval studies. Her scholarly work focuses on French medieval narratives and their reception in other language traditions. At Berkeley she has actively worked to challenge some of the disciplinary and institutional barriers that have reinforced the exclusion of questions of race and gender from medieval studies (and have made the field notably hostile to women and people of color). She also recently helped to organize an event on “Decolonizing Medieval Studies.”

Lea Johnson joins the University of Georgia Press from the University of California, San Diego, where she is a digital curator and PhD candidate in ethnic studies. Growing up between Los Angeles and Natchitoches, Louisiana, Lea developed an interest in circuits of culture and how black women negotiate space. Her interests include African American literature, the transnational South, and black feminist literary criticism. Currently, her dissertation explores race, gender, and the speculative literary imagination in the US South. She has also taught classes on the intersection of culture, art, and technology, helping students develop and experiment with creative projects across digital mediums. Her favorite books are Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

Nhora Lucía Serrano joins MIT Press from Hamilton College, where she has been a visiting assistant professor of comparative literature teaching interdisciplinary courses in visual narratives, virtual realities, cartography, and Latin America. Her recent professional experience and awards also include visiting scholar of comparative literature at Harvard University, 2018 Eisner Comic Industry Award judge, treasurer of the Comics Studies Society, Smithsonian National Postal Museum fellowship, and NEH Summer Institute on Modernism in Chicago. Originally from Colombia, she received her BA from Amherst College, MA from New York University, and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her scholarly work and editorial experience focus on visual studies and graphic arts books, comparative early modern and Latin American studies, digital humanities and technology, transnationalism, US Latinx studies, and immigration.

The fellowship program is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with a four-year $682,000 grant.

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