Duke University Press Log

American Literature article wins Cohen Prize

Congratulations to Cody Marrs for winning the 2011 Hennig Cohen Prize for best essay in Melville Studies from the Melville Studies Association.  Marrs’ article,  “A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville's Poetic Turn,” appeared in the March 2010 issue of American Literature, and is available for free here. 

SAQ Receives the 2011 CELJ Award for Best Special Issue

“Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law,” edited by Eric Cheyfitz, N. Bruce Duthu, and Shari M. Huhndorf received the 2011 Best Special Issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Award for Best Special Issue.  The award was announced at last week’s MLA meeting, and was accepted on behalf of the journal by editor Michael Hardt.

The essays in “Sovereignty, Indigeneity and the Law” consider historical and contemporary colonial conflicts and explore key topics in Indigenous studies, including land rights, human rights, legal jurisdiction, Indigenous governance, and questions of language, culture, and the environment.

For more about the issue, visit dukeupress.edu/saq.

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. 

Ousted Prime Minister on Greek economy

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou resigns today as the economic crisis in Greece continues to agitate European and global markets. Last year in the Mediterranean Quarterly, Papandreou assessed strategies for recovery in the eurozone, including government bailouts like the assistance that his successor is now tasked with securing from the European Union:
“It is essential to remember that it was not the public sector but the private financial sector — enabled by neoliberal governments —that caused the subprime bubble and speculative boom. And it was the bailouts and stimulus packages provided by governments that prevented the financial crisis from turning into another Great Depression. So it is only fair that the financial sector should bear some of the costs of the crisis, which was largely of its own making.” 
¾ George Papandreou in “A New Global Financial Architecture: Lessons from the Greek Crisis”

 Read the article for free here.

Mediterranean Quarterly on Libya

News outlets are reporting the as-yet unconfirmed death of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi near his hometown of Sirte this morning. This could signal the end of Qaddafi’s forces in power, and victory for the Libyan uprising that has been ongoing since February 2011. 

For some background on the uprising, an article in the most recent issue of Mediterranean Quarterly, “Libya: Dream versus Reality,” gives a very accessible historical overview of the situation in Libya and what is at stake in the current struggle. The article explains that Libya emerged under United Nations auspices as a stillborn, failed state dependent on Western subventions, and that the civil war in which it is now embroiled was inevitable.

Read the article for free here.

Duke University Press to Publish Tikkun

Duke University Press is pleased to announce the addition of the magazine Tikkun to its list of titles. Edited by Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun provides provocative analyses of American politics, culture, and social theory, and serves as a unique source of discourse about Israel and Palestine. Tikkun offers fresh ideas for those seeking to assist in the magazine’s goal: to heal and transform the world.

“Tikkun is a welcome addition to our publishing program,” says Duke University Press director Steve Cohn. “For the past twenty-five years, the magazine has been known as a powerful intellectual voice for the spiritual left and for taking on important and at times controversial topics.”  

While continuing to be the preeminent voice of liberal and progressive Jews, Tikkun has evolved into a major interfaith magazine and seeks to build bridges between religious and secular progressives. Tikkun’s editorial direction and mission will remain the same after the transition in publisher. Duke University Press will begin publishing the quarterly magazine in 2012 with volume 27.

About the transition, Rabbi Lerner says, “the new partnership with Duke University Press will bring Tikkun additional publishing and sales expertise as well as a shared commitment to publishing risk-taking and innovative intellectual work.”

Subscriptions for individuals, as well as reduced-price subscriptions for members of Tikkun’s Network of Spiritual Progressives, will be handled by the Tikkun editorial office at tikkun.org. The title will be included at no cost in the 2012 e-Duke Journals Scholarly Collections and will also be available through Project Muse. Institutions can subscribe by contacting Duke University Press at subscriptions@dukeupress.edu or by calling 888-651-1022 (toll-free in the US and Canada) or 919-688-5134.

American Literature Essay Wins 2010 Walker Prize

Congratulations to Chadwick Allen who has been awarded the 2010 Don D. Walker Award from the Western Literature Association for the year's best essay in western American literary and cultural study for his essay,  “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run.” Prize committee members wrote of the essay:

“I find the piece simply spectacular, and so novel in the field of literary studies generally for its interests in mathematics, astronomy, and science of any kind… Chad Allen is well known as a deft close reader, but here he takes this skill to an exponentially new level.”

“ [H]is reading of Blood Run is brilliant in its illumination of how Hedge Coke’s mathematically precise form aligns with her argument about the importance of the mounds as both presence and trace. I really think he hits it out of the ballpark here by showing the ties between mathematics, science, Indigenous technologies, and literature.”

The essay appeared in volume 82:4 (December 2010) of American Literature, and is available for free here. 

Radical Foodways

Today’s New York Times features an article about a school district in Greely, Colorado that is a forerunner in the back-to-scratch food movement.  Most of the school’s lunches will be prepared from scratch this year, rather than relying on packaged or frozen foods, in an effort to combat obesity and poor nutrition.

The back-to-scratch movement is just a small part of the growing “Good Food Revolution” that Americans have embraced. “Radical Foodways,” the most recent issue of Radical History Review examines this “revolution” (evidenced by best-selling books, popular movies and TV shows, local and organic agriculture initiatives, even a vegetable garden at the White House). It also looks at the foundations of the problems in our food supply, including the historical structures of colonialism, labor, regulation, memory, racial and gender inequality that persist in every bite we eat. 

Read the introduction for free here.

No Price Increase for Euclid Prime in 2012

Pricing for the 2012 Euclid Prime collection is now available: pricing for the collection has not increased from last year’s rates. 

Hosted on the Project Euclid platform, the collection includes 30 high-impact, peer-reviewed titles in theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics. New to the collection this year is the Missouri Journal of Mathematical Sciences.

 Beginning in 2012, domestic pricing will be based on the 2010 Carnegie Classifications and a new international pricing model based on World Bank Development Income Group Indicators will be introduced.

"Although the economy has started to improve, many libraries are still facing significant budget cuts in 2012," says Mira Waller, Project Euclid Manager.  “We recognize that these anticipated cuts are on top of continued annual reductions, so I am pleased to announce that the Euclid Prime prices will see no increase in 2012."

For more information about pricing and titles for the Euclid Prime collection, please visit dukeupress.edu/library/euclidprime or contact Journals Customer Service at euclidorders@dukeupress.edu.

Project Euclid is a joint venture of Cornell University Library and Duke University Press.

 

 

Call for Papers in American Literature: New Media and the Digital Humanities

Communications media have been integral to American life from the early colonization of New England to the transnational networks formed during the twentieth century. This special issue will explore the insights that emerge when we think about mediation in general and digital technologies more specifically in the context of American literary history and cultural production. Over the last decade, the work of scholars such as Alexander Galloway and Lisa Nakamura has already reframed key questions about class, gender, and race in visual and digital contexts. This issue seeks to explore further how new media change the way that we think about American literature and the methods we use to study it.

       This issue encourages a broad range of questions about the relationship between new media and American literature. How, for instance, might we think about literary representations of media that are perceived as new in their historical period? How do digital media transform the formal and political dimensions of contemporary American literature? How have prose styles and aesthetics, at different historical moments, been influenced by new communications technologies from the telegraph to the phonograph to cinema to the digital computer to mobile phones? Moreover, do the transmedia dimensions of such technologies suggest a scope that surpasses the geopolitical boundaries of the United States? Finally, how do American studies methods help us think about paraliterary productions such as electronic narratives and digital games? How does American literature help us understand the relationship between cultural theory (for example, critical race scholarship) and media studies (such as software studies)? How are digital humanities methods, both qualitative and quantitative, affecting American studies for better or worse? Are the humanities now necessarily digital?

       For this issue, there is also the possibility of an accompanying Web site that would publish peer-reviewed multimodal pieces that use new media in their very form. If you are interested in submitting a more experimental piece, please contact the editors before submitting. Some production support may be available for these works, especially for work undertaken in the new authoring platform Scalar. Scalar is designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form scholarship online. The platform particularly facilitates work that engages visual materials. For more information about Scalar, please see scalar.usc.edu/anvc.

     Special issue editors will be Wendy H. K. Chun, Patrick Jagoda, and Tara McPherson. Submissions of 11,000 words or less (including endnotes) should be submitted electronically at www.editorialmanager.com/al/ by 31 March 2012. When choosing a submission type, select “New Submission-New Media Special Issue.” For assistance with the submission process, please contact the office of American Literature at (919) 684–3948 or am-lit@duke.edu. Please direct other questions to Wendy H. K. Chun (Wendy_Hui_Kyong_Chun@Brown.edu), Patrick Jagoda (pjagoda@uchicago.edu), or Tara McPherson (tmcphers@usc.edu).