Duke University Press Log

Resources on Pearl Harbor from DUP

Today is the 70^th Anniversary of the attacks on the US at Pearl Harbor.  While flags are being flown at half-mast and various commemorations are going on around the country, here are some resources about the event from our books and journals:

A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory by Emily S. Rosenberg

 “Cracks in the Consensus: Defending the Rights of Japanese Americans During World War II,” by Robert Shaffer.  From RHR 72 (1998).

 “Moving History: The Pearl Harbor Film(s),” by Geoffrey M. White, From positions 5:3 (1997).

“Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story,” by Miriam Sliverberg. From positions 1:1 (1993).

 Click on the article titles to read them for free. 

Library E-Book Acquisitions Survey Results

In February 2011, Duke University Press administered an online Library E-Book Acquisitions Survey. Thank you to all the librarians who participated. The information that you generously shared will be invaluable to our work making Duke University Press e-books meet the needs and exceed the expectations of your library and your patrons. 

We are happy to share the report of our survey results here and hope that you will find them as interesting as we do. We welcome your comments and questions at libraryrelations@dukeupress.edu.

Duke University Press Award Winners at MLA

Duke University Press was the proud publisher of three award-winners at this year's Modern Language Association conference, held in Los Angeles, CA January 6-9. 

We'd like to congratulate Anjali Arondekar, author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India for winning this year's Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies from the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. 

 

We'd also like to recognize two of our journal special issues for being named Best Journal Special Issue from the Council of Editors and Learned Journals: "Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity," a special issue of GLQ.  edited by Daniel Heath Justice,  Mark Rifkin, and Bethany Schneider, and "Beyond the Strai(ght)s: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics," a special issue of positions, edited by Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel.  

Here are some pictures from the awards ceremonies:

CELJ award ceremony: Bethany Schneider accepts award on behalf of GLQ's "Sexuality, Nationality, and Indigeneity"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anjali Arondekar and "For the Record," which won the Alan Bray Memorial Award from the GL/Q Caucus

With B&N Closing a Store in NYC, Will Literary Culture Change?

New York Daily News reported today that Barnes & Noble will be closing its 15-year old Broadway store due to rising rent costs. With more customers turning to online outlets for books, brick-and-mortar bookstores, especially independent ones, have been struggling to remain relevant. Now, the chain bookstores are also feeling the strain of the economy and the growing interest in digital books. B&N's Lincoln Center location has been popular for many years because of its size and regular author events. With it closing, what does this mean for customers?

In Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins looks at how literary culture has transformed into a social activity, with superstore bookshops fueling it. Over the last two decades, superstore bookshops have helped create a customer community. With the rise of more digital books, will this change? Will reading once again become a solitary activity? 

Collins uses B&N as one of several examples to describe how literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Central to his analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined tasted is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. He explains that B&N is one of several institutions that provides that and helps drive literary culture. If B&N stores like the one near Lincoln Center continue to close, will literary culture start to morph?

Exciting Times for Readers and Publishers

Here at Duke Press we are midway through a five year planning process and have been spending this month breaking up into small groups that combine books and journals staff and talking about the future of publishing. That future looks both exhilarating and daunting. Over at the Huffington Post, Jason Pinter posits that we might be living through the most exciting time for book lovers. He wants to get beyond the doom and gloom of "print is dead," and instead celebrate the worldwide success of books by Stieg Larsson, the expansion of e-books, the ability of readers to connect online, and the popularity of movie adaptations of books. His optimism sounds a lot like that of Jim Collins, author of Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, which we'll publish in June. Collins, a Professor of Film and TV at Notre Dame, describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media.

Photo by Brittany Miller.

Duke Authors at the Modern Language Association Meeting

We were glad to see so many of our authors at our booth at the Modern Language Association meeting in Philadelphia last week.  Thank you to everyone who came to retirement party for Duke University Press editor Reynolds Smith and the celebration in honor of the tenth anniversary of our journal Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture.

At the event in honor of Reynolds Smith:

 

 

  

Jennifer Holberg and Marcy Taylor, editors of Pedagogy, celebrate the journal's tenth anniversary.

New Contest on Our Facebook Page

We've just posted a new contest on our Facebook fan page. February is Black History Month. African American Studies is an important part of our list, so we want to know which titles you like to use in your courses. What is your favorite Duke Press African American Studies book to either teach to or read for a class? Post your answer on the wall of our Fan page, and we'll select the winner at the end of the month. The winner will receive a free Duke Press book of his or her choice that relates to African American Studies. It's easy to become a fan of the Press if you're a member of Facebook; sign up today and stay tuned for a new contest each month.

New Contest on our Facebook Page

We've just posted a new contest on our Facebook fan page: What should Obama read? This month we're asking our fans what Duke Press book Barack Obama should read and why. Post your answer on the wall of our Fan page and we'll select a winner at the end of the month. Winner will receive a free Duke Press book of his or her choice, AND we'll send the book he or she suggests to the White House! It's easy to become a fan of the Press if you're a member of Facebook; sign up today and stay tuned for a new contest each month.

Antonio Viego Receives MLA Prize in U.S. Latina/Latino and Chicana/Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

Congratulations to Antonio Viego, author of Dead Subjects, for winning the MLA Prize in U.S. Latina/o and Chicana/Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. The prize is awarded for an outstanding scholarly study of Latina or Latino or Chicana or Chicano literature or culture. It is one of sixteen awards that will be presented on December 28, 2008 during the association’s annual convention, held this year in San Francisco. The committee’s citation for the winning book reads:

Antonio Viego’s Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies successfully realizes its stated ambitions by bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the politics of race, tracing new forms of identity through intersectional knowledge production, and combining theory with history and literary analysis. Through its refreshing conceptual paradigms, sophisticated execution, and original speculation, the book compellingly advances an understanding of ethnically marked and racialized subjects as complex dimensions of the human and social body. Viego’s persuasive effort to demonstrate the usefulness of Lacanian psychoanalysis within Latino studies expands the critical terrain in the field while innovatively partaking of the ongoing intellectual project to rethink identity and subjectivity in the larger realm of ethnic American studies.

Social Text Book Series Launch Party @ NYU

On November 21, Duke Press and Social Text will celebrate the launch of the first two books in the Social Text Books Series at a party at the NYU Tisch School of Arts. The first two books in the series are Randy Martin's An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management and Janet R. Jakobsen & Ann Pellegrini's Secularisms. For more information, please visit the Social Text Party Web page.