University of Nebraska Press

Krissed Off: Nebraska 2018

Do you like whiteboards? Are you excited by oversize pads of paper on easels? Then you'll want to hear all about our editorial retreat.  

Last month the acquisitions editors at Nebraska conducted a self-study aimed at setting our priorities for the next five years. The official results of our retreat are, of course, written in code and kept in a briefcase handcuffed to my wrist. But here's a taste of what you can expect:

1) More social science. Nebraska's had some pathbreaking books on environment and food in our At Table and Our Sustainable Future series – check out something like Green Illusions, if you haven’t already – and we've got one of the best lists in the anthropology of indigenous North America anywhere. But there's an opening for more along these lines, particularly given excitement on campus about the Water for Food Institute and similar initiatives. We've already started to grow in that direction with the announcement of a new series called Critical Environments – led by, among others, the hotshot geographer and public intellectual Julie Guthman, author of “Why Michael Pollan Makes Me Want to Eat Cheetos” – which will explore the relationship among science, politics, and environment. You'll start to see a more diverse portfolio in anthropology, too, particularly in fields like public anthropology, environmental anthropology, and ethnographies of the contemporary United States.

Krissed Off: Preserving the Ponca language

My colleague Matt Bokovoy met Louis Headman, a Ponca elder, about a year ago in Oklahoma. Bokovoy is the Indigenous Studies editor at the University of Nebraska Press and was on his way to a gig with his band in Oklahoma City. He was keen to talk with Headman about his work on the first Ponca dictionary, a project Headman was undertaking in collaboration with the language's remaining speakers -- a group of six elders.

Collaboration is key to publishing, perhaps nowhere more so than at university presses. When a press like Nebraska becomes involved with an ambitious and sensitive project like the Ponca dictionary, a lot of the acquiring editor's work comes down to helping assemble (and manage relations among) the right players.

Bokovoy was impressed with what Headman showed him during their first meeting. "Louis’s dictionary follows the same scholarly format that you would see from a linguist," Bokovoy told me. "He's a polymath with multiple graduate degrees, and he taught himself linguistics through his research on the history of the Ponca language." But Bokovoy also thought the project would benefit from collaboration not just with the few remaining native speakers, but with a professional anthropological linguist. Headman initially viewed the suggestion with suspicion, since a group of Osage friends had been through a negative experience with a linguist who struck them as arrogant. Bokovoy succeeded in winning Headman over when he introduced him to Sean O’Neil at the University of Oklahoma, an academic linguist dedicated to the idea of "shared authority." O'Neil is now coeditor of the dictionary.

Another collaborator on the Ponca project is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which supports Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas (RLLA), a multi-publisher initiative involving the university presses at Nebraska, Texas, and Oklahoma. RLLA assists the publication of scholarship about indigenous languages, and is dedicated to supporting indigenous communities in cultural preservation programs aimed at language recovery, revitalization, and maintenance. The grant from Mellon -- part of a program designed to stimulate collaboration among university presses -- is also facilitating the sort of delicate back-and-forth that's so central to complex and important projects like the Ponca dictionary.

The Ponca dictionary won't be out for a while, but if you're interested in the Ponca Nation, Nebraska has several books, including The Ponca Tribe, by John H. Howard (with an introduction by Judi M. gaiashkibos), as well as our great titles by Luther Standing Bear. If you're interested in the preservation of native languages more generally, you can check out Nebraska's first title in the RLLA initiative, Defying Maliseet Language Death, by Bernard C. Perley.

-Derek

Krissed Off: Seeing Nebraska in New Orleans

Like many Americans, I first saw Nebraska from the interstate, zooming through at seventy-five. My early encounters with the University of Nebraska Press were more numerous and more substantial. As a grad student and then editor living in the Northeast and Deep South I saw the Nebraska name on dozens of spines at bookstores and in my professors’ offices, and I read reviews of UNP books in the scholarly and general-interest press. Associations (all of them positive!) were formed. Nebraska – the publisher but also in some meaningful sense the university and the place – became, for me, much more than the pleasant but slightly monotonous eight hours between Wyoming and Iowa.

Here’s another way some non-Nebraskans encounter Nebraska: the book exhibit at scholarly conferences. Since I’m dealing with missing the American Historical Association conference for only the second time in sixteen years – and thinking about my Nebraska colleagues Bridget and Matt, who are off at AHA now – I hope you’ll indulge me as I reflect briefly on this peculiar, potent space.

The University of Nebraska Press displays its books and journals at many conferences and trade shows, concentrating on meetings that are important to scholars in our core publishing areas. You can see the geographic breadth of our conference attendance on this map, which shows where we’ve been in just the past twelve months:

It would be a stretch to say that our booth in the conference exhibit hall is a little piece of Nebraska plopped down in, for example, the Portland Hyatt. But not that much of a stretch.  Here conference attendees (often numbering in the thousands) can see and purchase UNP books, many about our state and region, or written by UNL faculty, or reflecting the broad, cosmopolitan strengths of the University of Nebraska. Conference-goers in New Orleans or New York can meet UNP staff – often editors, and always Nebraskans – to talk about their own work and learn more about the press, and by extension the university and the state. It all adds up to getting a sense of Nebraska, including the books and the people but also the visual identity (the logo and such) and the more general vibe.

Until recently I was the guy hanging out at the UNP booth instead of the guy staffing it, and I can say with authority that it makes a hugely favorable impression – that the Nebraska display is as compelling as those erected by temporary neighbors like Yale and California, and that the conversations are at least as exciting. Putting Nebraska into that sort of circulation is, I think, something the university press is uniquely positioned to accomplish. It’s a significant part of what we do.

-Derek

Krissed Off: The Searchability fetish

In 2006 a colleague at a leading university press told me “searchability is a fad.” His comment has been on my mind ever since.

Much of the discussion about electronic publishing, at least in scholarly circles, cycles back to searchability – the idea that our books will be more useful if readers can immediately home in on key words or phrases, either within a book or across many books. I spend a good part of my day with a search engine, so it’s not like I’m opposed to searching and searchability altogether. I’m not against electronic publishing either, although I’ve long been skeptical of claims about the demise of the printed book, especially on the scholarly side. 

My colleague’s point about the culture’s over-enthusiasm for searchability seems right, though, and I think he was expressing an idea that those of us in university publishing know well and should articulate more often. Usefulness often comes in bite-sized chunks, but genuine relevance is usually the product of long-form argument. University presses should do what they can to make sure their books are searchable, but should resist the deeper logic that seems threaded through our collective fixation on searchability – the implication that all books are, essentially, reference books. Read any page of Karen Ho’s Liquidated, Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape, or Anne Hyde’s Empires, Nations, and Families – to cite just a few extraordinary recent books from university presses – and you’re apt to learn an interesting fact or two. Read the whole thing and you may well understand the world differently.

I’ll leave it to tomorrow’s cultural historians to explain why Americans of the early twenty-first century tended to fetishize searching. (I don’t think it’s enough just to say “Google.”) In the meantime the University of Nebraska Press will continue to publish books that – even if they can be chunked, sliced, and searched – generally yield their greatest insights when consumed whole. 

-Derek

Krissed Off: Spot the dissertation

Can you guess which of the following award-winning, widely reviewed books from the past couple of years originated as a dissertation?

Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Pekka Hamalainen, Comanche Empire

Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts

Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current

Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street

Sarah Igo, The Averaged American

It’s a trick question; they all did. First books – often dissertations revised with the help of editors and peer reviewers – are among the most important scholarship published by university presses. The best revised dissertations are field-defining buzz books that generate excitement in, and sometimes outside, the academy. (Moreton, Sachs, and Igo were all reviewed in the New York Times.) Many sell well too, especially if they get assigned widely in courses.

If you think about it, the success of superlative first books makes sense. To make it in a cutthroat job market, new PhDs must position their work for maximum impact, and as a result they're often especially attuned to market considerations. But revised dissertations catch a lot of flak these days. Some of my colleagues at other university presses talk openly about how they won’t acquire this kind of book at all, even as the presses they work for continue to publish revised dissertations that are (as far as I can tell) strong performers. When some publishing professionals talk critically about books based on dissertations, I think they’re really talking about less interesting, less successful books in this category. “Revised dissertations,” according to this thinking, equals “bad revised dissertations.”

At Nebraska books by junior scholars are an important part of our publishing program. They complement books by professors at other career stages and by authors outside the academy, adding richness and variety to our portfolio. I’d encourage you to take a look at some first books from our list – starting perhaps with David Delgado Shorter’s We Will Dance Our Truth, Brian Frehner’s Finding Oil, David Preston’s The Texture of Contact, or Matthew Stanard’s Selling the Congo. And if you’re an author currently revising a dissertation for publication, you may be interested in Nebraska’s two Mellon-supported series, which consist entirely of books by junior scholars: Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas and Early American Places.

-Derek