University of Michigan Press Blog

University of Michigan Press Joins Books at JSTOR

Expanding the number of ways readers can access University of Michigan Press titles, the Press has joined Books at JSTOR, an initiative launching in June 2012 that will bring more than 20,000 ebooks to JSTOR’s expansive collection of online academic resources. JSTOR is already the go-to source for accessing scholarly journals online and also houses digital versions of more than one million primary sources. To date 22 publishers are on board for Books at JSTOR and the organizations hopes to launch with about 30 presses.

“Delivering deeply linked, vital scholarly research to libraries, scholars, and students worldwide is our number one goal,” said JSTOR Managing Director Laura Brown. “We are laying the foundation for a collaboration that will offer a transformative integration of book and journal literature that can enable new models for scholarly communication in the future.”

In addition to university presses, several independent publishers and international organizations have also announced support for Books at JSTOR, among them Boydell & Brewer, RAND Corporation, Russell Sage Foundation, and United Nations Publications. Edinburgh University Press and Toronto University Press, which joined at the same time as Michigan, represent the first university presses outside the United States to sign onto JSTOR’s ebooks platform.

Vodcast with Sara Fitzgerald, author of "Elly Peterson: Mother of the Moderates"

This is a vodcast with Sara Fitzgerald, the author of the forthcoming University of Michigan Press title, Elly Peterson: "Mother" of the Moderates. It chronicles the life and political history of Elly Peterson, one of the highest ranking women in the Republican Party. In 1964 she ran for a Michigan seat in the U.S. Senate and became the first woman to serve as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. During the 1960s she grew disenchanted with the increasing conservatism of her party, united with other feminists to push for the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive choice, battled Phyllis Schlafly to prevent her from gaining control of the National Federation of Republican Women, and became an independent.

 

A native of Michigan, Sara Fitzgerald worked for the Washington Post for 15 years as an editor and new-media developer. Prior to that, she worked as a reporter and editor for National Journal magazine, the St. Petersburg Times, the Miami Herald, and the Akron Beacon Journal.

See more Q&As with other University of Michigan Press authors at our YouTube page.

Powering the digital: Author of 'Digital Rubbish' tackles electronic waste

This is a guest blog by Jennifer Gabrys, author of Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, available now. 

Electronic waste is an increasing environmental issue. As one of the fastest growing waste streams, e-waste quantities—which are notoriously difficult to gauge due to a whole host of issues including stockpiling in homes and ambivalent classification systems—are estimated to be anywhere between 20-25 million tons per year to 35-40 million tons per year. Some studies suggest that e-waste will “peak” at 70-75 million tons annually by 2015. While countries such as the US and UK have been major contributors to the flow of e-waste, developing countries including China and India are now contributing to the overall volume of waste—waste that is hazardous and difficult to recycle without suitable infrastructures.

As I document in Digital Rubbish, e-waste is clearly an issue of considerable environmental significance; yet it also speaks to our contemporary material cultures of technological fascination, repetitive consumption, built-in obsolescence, shambolic resource use, and labor inequalities. In Digital Rubbish, I address these political and affective aspects of electronics, and examine specific instances of electronic waste across resource-intensive manufacturing, information overload and product obsolescence. In order to make the book a negotiable size, many other “waste spaces” fell outside the scope of the study, including mining sites where materials necessary for electronic conduction are procured; and off-shoring of manufacturing to Southeast Asia where labor and resource issues emerge for factory workers and software programmers alike.

'Poetry's Afterlife' wins acclaim, award

The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce UM Press author and Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein has been chosen as nonfiction runner-up in the Society of Midland Authors Award for books published in 2010. 

Stein was recognized for his work, Poetry’s Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age , released by the University of Michigan Press. At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed "death," Stein instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased.

UM Press remembers Douglas Toma

Douglas Toma Ph.D., UM Press author, and professor at the University of Georgia, passed away on May 4, 2011. He had battled melanoma for eight months and was 47 this year.

Toma had a distinguished career at the University of Georgia. He was also a Michigan native, University of Michigan alum, and an author with the University of Michigan Press. In 2003, the Press published Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University, a look at the use of athletic programs as a tool in "branding" universities and in building community spirit, support, and identity both on campus and off.

Call for Ideas & Essays: Writing History in the Digital Age

 
From DigitalCultureBooks, an innovative partnership between the University of Michigan Library and the University of Michigan Press with the intent of modeling library-press collaboration at U-M and elsewhere. Established in 2006:

Has the digital revolution transformed how we write about the past -- or not? Have new technologies changed our essential work-craft as scholars, and the ways in which we think, author, and publish? Does the digital age have broader implications for individual writing processes, or for the historical profession at large? Explore these questions in Writing History in the Digital Age, a born-digital, open-review edited volume, under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series @ digitalculturebooks, its imprint.

We invite you to contribute in the following ways:

 - Post your one-paragraph theme and discuss other ideas by June 30th, 2011.

 - Submit a full draft of your essay and bibliography by August 15th, 2011.

- Comment on essays, with invited experts, during the open review in Fall 2011.

Pending final selections, revisions, and approval by the Press, the volume will be published in traditional print and open-access digital versions. We welcome innovative essays that incorporate first-person perspectives, collaborative authorship, and links to online source materials. But each essay, at its core, must address our central theme on digital technology and historical writing.

Read more about essay ideas, post your own, and join the discussion at our website.

Co-editors: Jack Dougherty (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA) and Kristen Nawrotzki (University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany)

"Whispers of the Ancients" wins big at Midwest Book Awards

On May 11th, author Tamarack Song and illustrator Moses (Amik) Beaver’s Whisper of the Ancients: Native Tales for Teaching and Healing in our Time won three Midwest Independent Publishers Awards in the categories of Coffee Table Books, Social Studies, and Illustration.

Entries were at a record high among the 12 states represented at this year's award. Whispers of the Ancients placed first in Coffee Table Books, Social Science, and Illustration. It was a finalist for Culture, Inspiration/Gift Books, and Midwest Regional Interest.

Whispers of the Ancients is also a Nautilus Book Awards 2011 Gold Winner in the Multicultural/Indigenous category.

In Memoriam: Richard Bailey, Ph.D.

Last month, the University of Michigan Press was saddened to learn of the passing of Professor Richard Bailey. Richard was a professor at the University of Michigan, and a University of Michigan Press author many times over.

His work includes:

• English as a World Language (1982), Co-editor
• Dictionaries of English: Prospects for the Record of Our Language (1987), Editor

“the library of everyone concerned with or about dictionaries and lexicography.” --Verbatin: The Language Quarterly

• Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (1992)

This book demonstrates how people's opinions about the English language often reflect prejudice and hope, bigotry and pride, scorn and celebration. It offers a fascinating perspective on attitudes toward the English language—the rise and fall of ideas that English is nearly perfect or tumbling into decline.

• Nineteenth-Century English (1997)

Bailey shows how linguistic details gained powerful social meaning in the emergent stratification by class, region, race, and gender of the anglophone community.

“extensive and original research…any student of the language – and certainly any lexicographer or scholar interested in lexicon – would be well served by reading Bailey’s book."--The Lexicographer

•  The Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff (2003)

“ideal for readers who love delving into historical intrigue.” --Lansing State Journal

"compelling and strange" --James Tobin, author of To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight

"Out of the dark narrative of wordsmithing and murder, genius and evil, ripe with a whiff of formalin and scholarship, Dr. Bailey brings us the thing to be wished for--a great good read."--Thomas Lynch