University of Michigan Press Blog

Vancouver Winter Olympic Wrap-Up...A Skate in the Park Compared to Beijing?

Now that they're wrapping up, how will the Vancouver Olympics be remembered by history? How will China remember them, with a Winter Olympics count of 9 Chinese medals compared to 100 Chinese medals from the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

According to many Western commentators, the People's Republic of China seized the Summer Olympics in Beijing as an opportunity to reinvent itself as the "New China"—a global leader in economics, technology, and environmental issues, with an improving human-rights record. But China's maneuverings have also been hotly contested by diverse global voices, including prominent human-rights advocates, all seeking to displace the official story of the Games.

Black freedom struggles displayed in St. Louis, says story featuring UMP author

In the Sunday February 21st St. Louis Beacon political reporter Jo Mannies writes, “Much is made of the civil-rights movement in northern cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit, or southern cities like Atlanta and Memphis. Clarence Lang, associate professor at the University of Illinois in African-American Studies and history, argues in his new book Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 that the civil-rights histories in border-state cities like St. Louis offer a clearer window into the nation's longstanding struggle over race."

Click here to see the full story featuring Lang and Grassroots.

Podcast: Professor Paula Abrams Explores Landmark Pierce v. Society of Sisters Case

originally published as Lewis & Clark News, Feb. 11, 2010

Lewis & Clark law professor Paula Abrams has devoted her career to constitutional issues such as equality, reproductive rights, and the tensions between environmental and human rights approaches to population policy. In her latest book, Cross Purposes: Pierce v. Society of Sisters and the Struggle over Compulsory Public Education, she journeys into new constitutional terrain—the rights of parents.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN: PODCAST

Cross Purposes delves into the 1925 Supreme Court case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which sought to address the fundamental question: Do parents have the right to determine how their children should be educated?

This landmark case has affected how children are educated in this country today.  The underlying story, including the political and social impetus behind the case, also sheds light on how the U.S. government and citizens act when national security issues seem to threaten their way of life.

Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas

by guest author Alan Wolfe, Boston College Political Science, and editor of the series: Contemporary Political and Social Issues

"In 2008, John McCain, always known as something of a centrist or moderate Republican, picked the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. The moment he did so, the culture war returned to American politics. Although the economy was entering a tailspin and dangers were prominent around the world, once again we were discussing whether elites had lost touch with the common people by failing to appreciate religion and dismissing people’s concerns with morality.

The Palin selection raised a larger question: Did we ever have a culture war in the first place? In this book, Irene Taviss Thomson offers an original and important new way of answering that question. Whether or not a culture war indeed existed out there in Middle America, just about everyone who wrote on the topic agreed that elites themselves were sharply divided between liberal and conservative views of the world. And, the argument went, the raging culture war was especially apparent in the media, whatever was happening in small-town America...

Michigan's changes in the last 100 years

The University of Michigan Press Author Series will present a panel discussion on how the environment in Michigan has changed in the past 100 years, led by an editor and authors of the new Press book The Changing Environment of Northern Michigan: A Century of Science and Nature at the University of Michigan Biological Station.

The free event will be held from 5:30-7 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 22, at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery/Room 100 on the Diag in central campus.

Editor Alan Hogg, Jr., says this is what to expect:

"Watch one spot long enough, and something's bound to happen. Imagine how much you’d see if you watched 10,000 acres for 100 years. That's what scientists have been doing at the University of Michigan Biological Station. On Feb 22 you can talk to a few of the researchers who contributed to The Changing Environment of Northern Michigan.

President Barack Obama to Deliver University of Michigan 2010 Commencement Address

by Laura Lessnau, UM News Service. To check out University of Michigan Press new release Barack Obama's America, by John Kenneth White, click on the cover image below. 

President Barack Obama will deliver the spring 2010 commencement address at U-M, President Mary Sue Coleman announced Thursday.

Obama will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

“President Obama has captured the imagination and enthusiasm of many students with his inspiring words of hope and change. We are honored to welcome a leader of his distinction and look forward to his message,” Coleman said. “We could not be happier for the graduates who will celebrate their academic achievements with the president of the United States.”

The ceremony will be at 10 a.m. May 1 in Michigan Stadium. The university awards degrees to about 3,500 undergraduate students at spring commencement, before an audience of more than 40,000. Ticket information will be released at a later date.

Obama delivered his first State of the Union speech in January after completing his first year as the 44th president of the United States. His speech focused on the economy, jobs and the importance of establishing small businesses. The state of Michigan, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, is trying to reinvent itself in the wake of the auto industry’s transformation.

Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

Session at University of Michigan: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, "Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy"

Series: Series in Open Access

Presented by MPublishing with generous support from the Department of English Language & Literature and the Digital Media Studies Group
 
As part of an ongoing series of campus conversations about open access and scholarly publishing issues hosted by MPublishing, this talk will explore some of these changes, including shifts in the ways that we approach peer review, transformations in our conceptions of authorship, revisions in the structures of scholarly texts, increased attention to preservation in our libraries, and new partnerships among libraries, presses, and information technology departments in thinking about the place of publishing within the university infrastructure. MORE INFO

Details

Date: Feb 18th, 2010

Time: 10:00am - 12:00pm

Location: University of Michigan, Hatcher Graduate Library 100

Sins Invalid Interview: Terry Rowden

Sins Invalid’s Leroy Moore recently interviewed Terry Rowden, an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Staten Island. Terry is the author of The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness and coeditor of Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.

Leroy of Sins Invalid: As a Black professor and author teaching and writing on topics of popular culture, transnational cinema and philosophy, do you have a personal connection to what you teach and write about? Please give some background on why you teach and write on subjects that you do.

Terry Rowden: My interest in disability emerged primarily from within my teaching and research interests in African American and queer literature once I began to realize that all marginalized social identities reproduce to some extent the dynamics of disability as both a social construct and a lived condition. Disability has a special force as a means of rewriting normalizing narratives because it occurs across all social groups and categories. My overall project as a scholar is to reveal that abnormality is really just a political construct used to ground social hierarchies. For instance, all people who live into advanced old age, simply for that reason alone, will eventually experience some lessening of physical functioning significant enough to remove them

Let's Get Digital: New digitalculturebooks Website Launch

We're excited to announce the launch of a redesigned www.digitalculture.org, which seeks to be a portal to enriched books in new media studies and digital humanities. digitalculturebooks strives to create a media-rich context for its titles, and to provide readers options for access—for free online or for sale in print. To promote the broadest possible use and access, the website and books carry Creative Commons licenses.

This imprint and website is a collaborative effort among technologists, project managers, editors, and librarians from the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library. Michigan is in the process of bringing together the complementary publishing strengths of these units, along with the Library's Copyright Office and institutional repository, Deep Blue, under the umbrella of MPublishing. Our statement of purpose has just been posted, and we look forward to the continued development of collaborative publishing efforts here at U-M.

To find out more about digitalculturebooks, please see our available titles and read about our digital publishing methods. For more information about the digitalculturebooks imprint, please contact digital-culture@umich.edu.

New Discounts for Black History Month

30% Discounts

Use code bhm10 before March 31, 2010

Click to view all discounted titles