University of Michigan Press Blog

University of Michigan Press author Jacob Soll named MacArthur Foundation Fellow

Jacob Soll, a Professor of History at Rutgers University who has published both of his books to date with the University of Michigan Press, was named this week as a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. The fellowship, which carries a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for the next five years, is awarded to scientists, researchers, and exceptional people in the public sector based on "creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future."

Soll's books were mentioned extensively in his biography at the MacArthur Foundation. Three University of Michigan faculty were also named as fellows.

"Jacob Soll is a historian whose meticulously researched studies of early modern Europe are shedding new light on the origins of the modern state," the Foundation's site reads. "Drawing on intellectual, political, cultural, and institutional history, Soll explores the development of political thought and criticism in relation to governance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Western Europe."

Soll's first book, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism, won the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society. His second, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System, sold out in hardcover and is now available in paperback.

Congratulations, Dr. Soll!

Komunyakaa Receives Major Poetry Award

Recognized for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, Blue Notes author Yusef Komunyakaa has been selected as the recipient of the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award from The Academy of American Poets. Chosen by The Academy's Board of Chancellors, a body of fifteen eminent poets, Komunyakaa will receive a stipend of $100,000 and be honored at the fifth annual Poets Forum, October 20-22, in New York City. He will read from his work at the Poets Awards Ceremony on Friday, October 21, 7:00 p.m. at The New School's Tishman Auditorium.

Featured as a part of the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, Komunyakaa's books include Blue Notes, a collection of essays, interviews, poems, and performance texts.

Modern politicans aren't the first to verbally stumble, 'Elly Peterson' author writes

Sara Fitzgerald, a former Washington Post journalist, is author of Elly Peterson: 'Mother' of the Moderates.

Will a statement made by a tired politician at the end of a long day of campaigning help define the 2012 presidential race?

• Michele Bachmann placing the “shot heard ‘round the world” in New Hampshire instead of Massachusetts?
• Rick Perry labeling the Federal Reserve chairman’s management of the economy as “treasonous?”
• Mitt Romney’s response to a heckler that “corporations are people, too?”

Romney knows very well the consequences of making a statement that comes to be defined as a “campaign gaffe.” Forty-four years (and 11 presidential election cycles) ago this August 31, his father, Michigan Gov. George Romney, spent a day at the Michigan State Fair and then taped an interview with Lou Gordon, the host of a show called Hot Seat on WKBD-TV in Detroit.