Reading University Press and University Pressth week. Im cow, one of the managers here and i think i speak for all of us at book called was a University Press, especially our friends at columbia University Press, nyu press and fordham University Press take up a large part of what we do here for the past 20 years. They are heavily featured in a dense programming, our displays are often at in a weekly annual bestseller list though it shows our Customer Base loves them as well. A couple of housekeeping before i move over to our lovely panel. We have a lot of books for sale here we do not have register up here so if youre free to take a bunch, give insight to make sure to pay for them on the way out. Well be here for years to come during this event. You may have noticed the cameras. Cameras. Cspan is here so we get to the q a portion, if you have a question make sure you wait for the mic to get to you so that you can hit the question as well as see. I will turn it over to our panel. Great. Thank you, kyle. Hello and welcome to our University Press week celebration. My name is fred and a director of fordham University Press picked this is her eighth annual u. P. Week. Been a of the task force since 2014 and chairperson for two of those years. This year the theme is read, think, act. To help us prepare for the 2020 election and do with the tumultuous political and cultural environment of theon fd ourselves in now. How the Universe Press contributes to the conversation and createbo a sense of committe and collaboration as we unpack these difficult and often controversial topics such as immigration, race, artificial intelligence, Climate Change and so muchh more. Why do we do what we do and why do authors choose to publish for University Presses . Thats why we are here will hear from editors and authors from three major new york city University Presses, colombia, fordham and in what you. We our Mission Driven and willing to take chances. Unlike commercial presses that are looking for bestsellers and unless we develop rigorous scholarly methodology. Au presses the contractor peter said University Presses champion authors whose work can make a real difference in how all of us think about r politics, religio, economics, science, technology, human rights and the natural world, among other important topics. Without University Presses many of these ideas would never make it into broader conversation. We are proud to make this aspect of our communities work and the impact they can have. Our theme for University Press week 2019, read, think, act. Id like to know theres a reading list including an online gallery of covers highlighting books from 75 University Presses the best represent the theme of read, think, act. Go to au presses. Org and click on the link. I highly recommend you check it out. Its a visual and intellectual feast. More than 40 have signed up to riches but in the 2019 blog tour, organize around these things. How to be a better global citizen, how to speak up and speak out, how to be environmentally steward, how to build community. How to practice compassion. Last week i was interviewed by a journalist from fox meeting and she asked me how do readers engage with University Press books, and i told her that they should go into stores like book culture, look around and are so many University Press books, its fantastic and we need to do more to the local independent book shows. Thanks to book culture for continuing to support University Presses and for hosting this event tonight. I want to mention we created these great bags for University Press week. Read think act, and fordham University Press, although plug for us so if you buy a book youll get you also get a read up bookmark. By lots of books. So id like to be editors and authors from a Universe Presses to introduce themselves and give a brief overview of the book and have ties into this years theme of read, think, act and afterward ill ask them questions and then turned over to the audience to ask their own questions and so we will start with columbia. Its called whistleblowing nation, a history of National Security disclosures and the cult of State University and so everyone knows theres a lot of talk about whistleblowing in the news today and any contemporary politics more generally but outside of a few major figures, the history of that phenomenon is really under examined and so this is an edited volume that examines the vast history from the era of world war i to the present. And it really attempts to apply interdisciplinary approaches so we have historians, we have political theorists, literary scholars trying to move beyond clichcs that tend to dominate the way we talk and fight over whistleblowers so generally speakingwhistleblowers are heroes or traders. How can we break past that binary and examine more structural developments that have happened over the past century with respect to this phenomenon so its really trying to get more systemic to think about the whistleblower phenomenon, the states response to it , the historical consciousness of that phenomenon, popular clincher of that phenomenon and needless to say, it would be difficult to publish that kind of book with a commercial press. There are loads of books about whistleblowing but they tend to reinforce the clichcs that we are trying to get past. Whistleblowers are heroes, whistleblowers are traitors. Weve always had whistleblowers, its as american as apple pie or the state only clamps down on whistleblowers, theres nothing in between so its really the place of University Presses i think that value a more nuanced approach, more indepth approach and also a multialtered look, the idea of an edited volume is becoming increasingly difficult to publish even withinUniversity Presses but certainly in a commercial environment , impossible. So briefly to dig deeper into the phenomenon of whistleblowing, think beyond the tired binaries that too often constrain the ways we think and talk and act about in relationship to whistleblowing and act supporting whistleblowers, certainly but not just in partisan ways, not just thinking about the current moment and people who are speaking out about trump though thats great but howdo we think in a more antisystemic fashion about the whistleblowers that dont get attention . That historically both democrats and republicans have persecuted and jailed and also protecting journalists who are increasingly being threatened in the same ways that whistleblowers have historically so rethink , act. So im will serve on, i work in University Press and the bookim here to discuss along with the contributor to the book is another edited collection , whose middle ages, teachable moments for an ill used past. This one is also a very interdisciplinary book of the kind that could only happen at a University Press. We have a lot of art historians talking with literary people, with historians and the spectrum of people who study the premodern field. This book is growing as a longstanding need within that field which is afield that attracts a great number of reactionaries. Adolf hitler was a huge fan of the middle ages for a lot of reasons as are a lot of spree shooters. The shooters in norway and new zealand both consider themselves crusaders and were not only using the language of civilizational warfare but were also exciting crusades scholarship in their manifestoes and in their construction of what they were trying to do. So in many ways the need for work like this has existed since the 20s. And its been happening but its been happening within the confines of the academy. Occasionally people will go and speak out, but more so the middle ages have existed as a space for imagination and play and really just putting whatever you want to communicate on to them. They are a canvas. So in the wake of the charlottesville protests, the unite the right rally, there was this moment when a lot of legalists said thats enough, we need to do something about this. And this book came out of that. That was of course not the only such effort. I should mention jonathan hsu and julie are nancys partial bibliography of race in the middle ages. The media list of color collective that has enacted for years trying to bring about structural change in the economy and how we deal with vested power structures, especially in the field of medieval studies but also outside of them so what this book looks like in about 25 essays is stuff thats broken through into the popular consciousness, Something Like sharia law which is used as a punching bag but actually means something much drier and more benign than a sean hannity is going totalk about it. Its a, look at trade routes. Theres so much ivory in Medieval Europe and its coming from africa so obviously there was context with africa. Its just this basic thing that gets left out of most history, most popular history. When people think historians dont know about this because historians do know about it and they tell University Presses. So among those various responses to charlottesville and just all of the heated and heightened rhetoric around the past, i like to think of this as distinctly you. Response, it is written for general audiences but in that writing, the authors are all constrained by the rigor of the economy. Its not like, its a bit like a textbook. But it is, it maintains the things that make scholarship different from other writing. Its original scholarship. It is careful writing. That makes an especial point to be rigorous and peerreviewed and all that stuff makes it a University Press book. I would be remiss s not to mention that as a product of the University Presssystem , this book contains, and replicates many of the power structures that groups like the media list of colorhave been speaking out against and continue to speak out against. It questions about what kind of work counts and what kind of work is feasible which may not be the right crowd to discuss this with but this is something that we need to our self rethink and act about. As we build our publication programs. But above all, University Press publishing is an t ecosystem. Not every book that we published, many books that we published do not indirectly address the presence of social media and every book that addresses a pressing social need is necessarily going to leave awhole lot out but as long as we listen generously and Work Together , we are contributing to the better world that is knowledge and thoughtfulness can create. Thank you. Im lauren nancy, one of the authors in this collection and imgoing to tell you a little bit about my essay so you get a sense of the kind of work we are doing and im also an assistant professor at of history. And there are editors of this volume asked me as a specialist to respond to the book the benedict option which was published in 2017 by rod drager and rod is a Christian Conservative who is actually one of the favorite go to darlings of the liberal media. The liberal media enjoys rod dreher as they quote him often, they interview him often, there was an america piece about him and david brooks called his book the most important religious book of our decade and this book spends time speaking to Christian Conservatives and saying the republican establishment has betrayed Christian Conservatives. It has not protected them from the sort of ideals of the enlightenment, of capitalism, from the lgbtq agenda and they should make this 16 century mark and they should live in the little arcs amidst the barbarity of the world. He spends the book outlining how they should go. Based on his reading of medial monastic texts and his experience living with this Benedictine Community in england and one of the first things i do to critique his argument is to note that medieval monks did not call what they were doing living in arcs amidst the barbarity of the world. He instead called what they were doing living in tabernacles, its a dwelling place among the people and monks in establishing monasteries were not interested in monastic environments, they were interested in monastic environments and reconcile reconciling experiences people came with instead of sort of streamlining them and making them all one they had to lireconcile with that couple get a diversity. And the point of this essay and one of the reasons why it does well in a University Press book is that its trying to make its way in history instead of the black and white, similar to what anna was saying before but people look at the middle ages and say barbarians or oak, a dark age or arcs in the middle of a barbaric age and instead what we need to understand is that medieval people were wrestling with a diverse and complicated society in the same way we are and in order to understand our diverse and collocated society we can look to historical societies that have wrestled with something similar and can understand how they grappled with the gray area instead of just demoting it to a blackandwhite understanding of the historical past. Fabulous. I learned a lot already, thank you. My name is halo lopez and i am a political scientist, a professor at the school for conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University which is in arlington virginia, mostly, were also in fairfax and i am coauthor with tina swat smith of our book, a peoples guide to making allblack lives matter and there process for us working with nyu press has been fabulous and very much the idea for the book that started in house at the press and it came to canada and you should probably be the one telling the story in a way but since were going in order i guess ill tell part of that. And so because candace had published previously with nyu press and they knew that this was part of her wheelhouse is to look at black politics in the United States, and seeing whats happening, whats unfolding with black lives matter, that she was an obvious person to say you need to be interested in writing on this and she and i have the time were trying to collect data in a nationwide survey about peoples opinions about black lives edmatter. So she asked if i want to be part of this and as we started to craft the book, it started to become a different book than what we had originally thought it would be. It wasnt going to be so much a book about what people thought about black lives matter or precisely what were the politics involved in black lives matter so much as why was this even happening at all . What was setting the stage for this and why was it necessary and we like to say and point out in the second term of americas in the biracial president , so we started writing this book to fill what we felt was a void in our syllabus, to talk to our students and get them ve engaged and to make this information that she and i have been ridding other University Press books, learning about the United States and race and racism and trying to distill it in a way that was accessible not only to our students but also to readerships beyond the classroom and so we ended up writing this book which has now like something that digs deep into uncomfortable questions that is providing some guidance and some questions to mull over in Group Settings together. So i feel like i should spread this around a little bit. Theres a small emergency inthe back. These people cant see. My name is Candace Watts smith, associate professor of politicalscience and africanamerican studies at penn state. And hamer is coauthor, i mention this is my second book with nyu press. Its my third University Press book. And i wanted to highlight two things i think really just kind of mimicking and mirroring some of what folks have contributed already. I think people who are really interested in, who follow the news, we tend to interact as if everything is an anecdote or a thing thats happening for the first time. And we know that many scholars spend their lives just digging in to one particular set of patterns and so it turns out that there are an array of scholars who know a lot of stuff about sometimes one thing but its the thing that were talking about at the moment likewhistleblowing. That there are people who study patterns and we know that anecdotes are not data, data is data. So thats one of the for me, one of the Important Reasons to shift ahead and give tattention to University Presses. I think the book at University Presses is that form, its really important to because in academia, one of the kind of currencies of academia is the article. And the article is often published in a place where very few people can access that thing. Or its very expensive. And eileen and the folks at nyu press have been, i dont know how tthey do it. You can explain. But our work becomes more accessible just by the sheer being in a bookstore and being affordable in a way that the kind of highly technical hard to read