Duke University Press Log

Wangechi Mutu and Willie Birch Win United States Artists Fellowships

Congratulations to two Duke University Press contributors, Wangechi Mutu and Willie Burch, who have won $50,000 fellowships from United States Artists. United States Artists (USA) invests in the fundamental value individual artists contribute to American society. Representing eight creative disciplines, the award recognizes America’s most accomplished and innovative artists.

Wangechi Mutu's first solo show in the U.S., Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, began its nationwide tour at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art in 2013. Duke University Press published the gorgeous full-color catalog for the show. It is now featured at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1972, and now based in Brooklyn, Mutu renders the complex global sensibility of the early twenty-first century through a distinctly hybrid aesthetic. She combines found materials and magazine cutouts with sculpture and painted imagery, sampling from sources and phenomena as diverse as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, and science fiction. In her work, Mutu marries poetic symbolism with sociopolitical critique to explore issues of gender, race, war, colonialism, and, particularly, the exoticization of the black female body.

Willie Birch's striking black and white illustrations of New Orleans musicians bring the characters in Matt Sakakeeny's 2013 book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans to life. Birch is an international artist who lives in New Orleans, where he was born in 1942. Birch received his BA from Southern University New Orleans in 1969 and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 1973. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the State of Louisiana Governor's award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His works are part of the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Congratulations to these two talented artists!

Tikkun Wins 2014 Magazine of the Year Award

Tikkun Managing Editor Alana Price accepts the RNA 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award. Credit: Dawn Cherie Araujo.

Congratulations to Tikkun, winner of the prestigious 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award from the Religion Newswriters Association! The Religion Newswriters Association's awards recognize journalism excellence by measuring a magazine's grasp on a diversity of religion issues.

Tikkun, published quarterly, offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives. By bringing together voices from many disparate religious and secular humanist communities to talk about social transformation, political change, and the evolution of our religious traditions, Tikkun creates space for the emergence of a religious Left to respond to the influence of the religious Right and the distortions of global capitalism, while simultaneously critiquing reductionist views that sometimes prevail in liberal and progressive circles.

The most recent issue of Tikkun is available online here. To subscribe to Tikkun, visit www.tikkun.org.

To learn more about the award, please visit www.tikkun.org/rna.

 

Duke University Press at the 2014 IFLA World Library and Information Congress

L to R: IFLA Attendees Elizabeth Chapman (University of Sheffield) and Lauren Smith (University of Strathclyde) with Library Relations & Sales Manager Kim Steinle at the Duke Univesrity Press booth at IFLA.

Last week we attended the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Lyon, France. This year's IFLA Congress was the best attended in the last several years, with 3,900 delegates from all over the world, including France, Korea, Kazakhstan, China, Japan, Uzbekistan, Uganda, Nigeria, Russia, Trinidad & Tobago, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

We attend this conference in order to meet librarians from around the world, learn about issues that affect or are important to the global library community, and to promote our Press internationally. Next year's Congress will be held in Cape Town, South Africa and the 2016 Congress will be held in Columbus, Ohio.

Frances Pinter, Executive Director of Knowledge Unlatched, accepting the 2014 IFLA/Brill Open Access Award at IFLA

IFLA/Brill Open Access Award
Congratulations to Knowledge Unlatched for winning the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award! Knowledge Unlatched "depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust... The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines." Knowledge Unlatched was chosen as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field. Read the full press release here.

Duke University Press is very excited to be a part of this program! We've included four books in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot program: Bilogical Relatives by Sarah Franklin, In Search of the Amazon by Seth Garfield, My Voice is My Weapon by David McDonald, and Ever Faithful by David Sartorius. 

Editor of Duke Mathematical Journal wins Chern Medal Award

Congratulations to Duke Mathematical Journal editor Phillip Griffiths! He was awarded the 2014 Chern Medal for his work in complex geometry, particularly his work in Hodge theory and periods of algebraic varieties. The prize is given at the International Congress of Mathematicians, which is being held currently in Seoul, South Korea.

To read the official press release, click here.

Several contributors to DMJ have also been awarded the Fields Medal, including Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the medal. Other winners include Artur Avila and Manjul Bhargava. See a list of their contributions to DMJ below. Congratulations to all!

For more information on Duke Mathematical Journal, visit dukeupress.edu/dmj.

Contributions to DMJ from Fields Medalists include:

Maryam Mirzakhani, co-author of "Lattice point asymptotics and volume growth on Teichmüller space," here; Artur Avila, co-author of "Cohomological equations and invariant distributions for minimal circle diffeomorphisms," here and "Generic Singular Spectrum For Ergodic Schrödinger Operators," here; and Manjul Bhargava, co-author of "Error estimates for the Davenport-Heilbronn theorems," here.

American Literature Article Wins Prize

Congratulations to Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue for winning the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The Don D. Walker Prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year.Sae-Saue's article, "Aztlán’s Asians: Forging and Forgetting Cross-Racial Relations in the Chicana/o Literary Imagination," appeared in the September 2013 issue of American Literature (85:3).  Curtis Marez's piece from American Literature (85:4) was given an honorable mention for the same award.

To read Sae-Saue's article, made freely available, click here.

Honorable Mention for American Literature Digital Open Access Piece

Congratulations to Curtis Marez, who received an honorable mention for the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year. The award committee found Marez's American Literature piece, "Cesar Chavez's Video Collection," "an exciting, innovative work of interdisciplinary scholarship that reflects the aspirations of the Walker Award in demonstrating the untapped possibilities of our still unfolding field."

The digital piece was a collaboration between the journal and Scalar, a multimedia authoring and publishing web platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Read more about the piece in a previous guest blog post by American Literature managing editor Emily Dings entitled "Chavez Behind the Camera," here. “Cesar Chavez’s Video Collection” is an offshoot of Marez’s book Speculative Technologies: Migrant Workers and the Hidden History of New Media (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and is available on the Scalar platform here.

Check out the rest of the American Literature special issue, "New Media and American Literature," which includes three additional open-access digital projects, here.

Two Articles from French Historical Studies Win Awards

We are happy to announce that Richard C. Keller and Jaime Wadowiec have both won awards for their articles featured in French Historical Studies.

Richard C. Keller won the Koren Prize for his article, "Place Matters: Mortality, Space, and Urban Form in the 2003 Paris Heat Wave Disaster" (volume 36, issue 2). The William Koren Jr. Prize is awarded to the outstanding journal article published on any era of French history by a North American scholar in an American, European, or Canadian journal.

For her article, "Muslim Algerian Women and the Rights of Man: Islam and Gendered Citizenship in French Algeria at the End of Empire" (volume 36, issue 4), Jaime Wadowiec won the Berkshire Conference Article Prize. The Berkshire Conference Article Prize is for the best article in the fields of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality by a woman who is normally resident in North America.

Read the articles, made freely available until the end of June.

Our congratulations to both the winners!

Duke University Press Designers Recognized by AAUP

Congratulations to our book and journal designers for being recognized for excellence by the Association of American University Presses! Four books and one journal are being featured in this year's AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal show.

Precarious Japan by Anne Allison was recognized in the Scholarly Typographic category. Courtney Leigh Baker was the designer.

Traveling Heavy by Ruth Behar, designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan, was also recognized in the Scholarly Typographic category.

 

 

Christopher Wright's The Echo of Things, designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan, was recognized in the Scholarly Illustrated category. 

 

Alternative Medicine by Rafael Campo, also designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan, was recognized in the Poetry and Literature category and in the Jackets and Covers category.

 

The February 2013 issue of Hispanic American Historical Review (93:1) was recognized in the Jackets and Covers category. It was designed by Kelly Andrus.

Congratulations to all our talented designers and to everyone at Duke University Press who works so hard to be sure our books are beautiful as well as smart.

 

 

College Art Association 2014 Annual Meeting

Last week we enjoyed selling books and meeting authors at the 2014 annual meeting of the College Art Association in Chicago. We were glad our staff got out of Durham in time to miss the huge snowstorm that closed the university for three days. For once the weather may have been worse here than in Chicago!

We were thrilled to congratulate T. J. Demos on his winning of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. The awards committee said that his book The Migrant Image "eloquently analyzes contemporary art that engages the current political reality of continual humanitarian crises while maintaining an open-ended appeal to the imagination."

It was also exciting to participate in the launch of the Art HIstory Publication Initiative's new website. The AHPI is a partnership of university presses whose mission is to help bring art history publishing into the digital age by tackling some of the obstacles that have made it difficult for scholars and publishers to take advantage of evolving digital technologies. Editorial Director Ken Wissoker took part in the "Getting Published in the Digital Age" panel with other AHPI members.

Our first book produced with funds from the AHPI is Hannah Feldman's From a Nation Torn. Here she is with her brand new book. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are a few other authors posing with their books.

 Richard J. Powell, who curated the new exhibition Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, and edited the catalog, which we distribute. The show is currently at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and will travel to LA County Museum of Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

William Marotti, author of Money, Trains, and Guillotines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, author of Seeing the Unspeakable. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John P. Bowles, author of Adrian Piper. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maria Elena Buszek, author of Pin-Up Grrrls and editor of Extra/Ordinary.

 

Parties and Awards at the 2014 MLA

We had a great time selling books, meeting authors, and congratulating award-winners at the 2014 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago last week.

Congratulations to the authors and journals who won awards at this year's MLA! Nicole Guidotti-Hernández won the tenth biennial MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Here she is with her book Unspeakable Violence.

Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins won the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures for their book Beyond the Lettered City. Congrats to them! 

 

 

 

 

 

We're also excited that Mel Y. Chen's Animacies won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize given by the GL/Q Caucus of the MLA. Here she is accepting her award. 

 

 

 

Three of our journals also won Council of Editors of Learned Journals awards. See our post on those awards here.

In addition to these great awards, we were excited to launch the new series Theory Q at this year's MLA. Theory Q is the successor series to Series Q, which we closed upon the death of founding editor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The new series is edited by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, who launched it with their own book Sex, or the Unbearable. Here they are posing with their book. Can we start a trend of posing with this fabulous cover? 

The above photo is of Tim Campbell, co-editor of the new collection Biopolitics. Here he is with his own book. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to all the authors and editors who stopped by the booth. Check out more photos on our Facebook page!