American University Press Research Articles

New Methodologies in the Study of Natural History

New Methodologies in the Study of Natural History Elizabeth Polcha (bio) The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World ralph bauer University of Virginia Press, 2019 650 pp. Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin daniela bleichmar Yale University Press, 2017 226 pp. Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World michael gaudio University of Minnesota Press, 2019 196 pp. The Natural History of Sexuality in Early American Literature greta lafleur Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018 286 pp. If you have the chance to page through a copy of Daniela Bleichmar's catalogue Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin from the 2017–18 exhibition at the Huntington Library cocurated with Catherine Hess, you will undoubtedly be drawn to an image that accompanies the introduction to the book: a photo of a nearly four-hundredyear-old floor-length Tupinambá cape covered in bright red guará feathers. [End Page 545] The cape was made by Tupinambá artists in seventeenth-century Brazil for sacred use. As Bleichmar explains, "When Shamans wore feather garments in ritual occasions, they were not simply putting on a beautiful costume: they were transforming themselves into birdlike creatures that, through dance and song, invoked powerful forces" (xii). Sixteenth-century French colonizers like André Thevet, who recorded his observations on similar capes in documenting Tupinambá dance practices, could not understand the transformational meaning of such an object. In the context of a natural history exhibition, or printed within the pages of a catalogue, the cape is similarly separated from its sacred use. Yet as viewers, we are undoubtedly drawn to the photograph of this stunning object that is miraculously wellpreserved. In carefully confronting this disjuncture in knowledge, Bleichmar asks whether the cape belongs in a museum or whether it should be repatriated back to Brazil (xi). In a similar vein of thought, we might ask: How can we resist colonial frameworks when researching a discipline as marked by dispossession and violence as natural history? The Tupinambá cape, and Bleichmar and Hess's thoughtful contextualization of it in their exhibition, is one example of how the recent wave of scholarship in natural history is much more than an intervention into the history of science. Recent studies in natural history follow routes of collection that cut across geographies, while questioning the relationship between the local and the global and opening up new frameworks for thinking about genre and medium. Within this work, preserved specimens, sacred objects, and visualizations of plants are as important to studying naturalist knowledge as printed materials and popular narratives. What the more recent wave of scholarship offers for early Americanists is a renewed interest in methodology and new ways of reading, observing, and listening to the material and print archives of the colonial Americas. Consider, for example, how Michele Navakas's scholarship on coral reorients understandings of eighteenth and nineteenth-century literary taxonomy, or how Sari Altschuler's analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" calls attention to Poe's fascination with fungus and a fungal theory of cholera. What this exciting work demonstrates is that scholars are closing the gap between history of science scholarship and humanities disciplines like art history, museum studies, gender and sexuality studies, and religious studies. This trajectory is part of a longer current of research that is sometimes [End Page 546] referred to as "colonial science" studies.1 In the past twenty years, scholarship on what we now call "science" and "ecology" has been crucial to the shifting discourse in early American studies, with pathbreaking works like Joyce Chaplin's Subject Matter (Harvard UP, 2001), Londa Schiebinger's Plants and Empire (Harvard UP, 2004), Susan Scott Parrish's American Curiosity (UNCP, 2006), Christopher Iannini's Fatal Revolutions (UNCP, 2012), Monique Allewaert's Ariel's Ecology (U Minnesota P, 2013), Pablo Gomez's The Experiential Caribbean (UNCP, 2017), and James Delbourgo's Collecting the World (Harvard UP, 2017). In Early American Literature's recent special issue titled "The New Natural History" (vol. 53, no. 4), editor Michael Boyden convincingly argues that the turn toward natural history in the past...

Recollections of Eudora Welty: Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans to Pinehurst Street, Jackson

Recollections of Eudora Welty:Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans to Pinehurst Street, Jackson Hunter McKelva Cole I recall that Eudora rode back to Jackson with me after giving a reading at an annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. I forget the year,1 but the occasion was soon after the publication of One Writer's Beginnings. The site was the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans. On Sunday after the close of the AAUP meeting, I connected with Eudora in the hotel's coffee shop. She was having breakfast there with Seta Sancton, a dear friend from Old Jackson but then living in New Orleans. (Seta's family had lived a few blocks from the Weltys during Eudora's high school days. Eudora told me that Seta was one of those girls who could not resist pausing to play a few chords whenever she passed a piano. "Fur Elise"2 was her theme song. She often would run her fingers over the keys of the Welty's piano. Tom Sancton, Seta's husband, was a novelist and national journalist, and their son Thomas Jr. was the Paris bureau chief for Time magazine.) During the ride home, Eudora remarked that prior to giving her presentation before the AAUP audience, she had had her hair done in the hotel beauty shop and that, as it happened, the hairdresser was a young man from Jackson. He told her he was a graduate of the Fondren School of Beauty. Eudora was amused by his account of having participated recently in an international hairdressing competition held in Las Vegas. Competing hairdos had absurdly fantastical names, which he cited and which Eudora remembered and then jotted on the back of an envelope. She opened her purse and read the list to me. The titles delighted her. And me. They had names such as these that I'll make up: "Fantastical Parisian Holiday Extravaganza" and "A Venetian Night in the Gondola of Love." A few months later Eudora drove down to Baton Rouge to Louisiana State University with me for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of The Southern Review, at which she was one of the main speakers. On stage she read aloud one of her stories3 that had been published in that journal when Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were the editors. The story was "Petrified Man." Perhaps I was the only one in the audience who noticed, [End Page 307] but in reading a passage of dialogue in the beauty parlor Eudora slyly inserted the names of those wild hairdos from the Las Vegas competition. This, too: For her public readings, Eudora usually read from the Modern Library edition of her stories. It was well-worn, coverless, and probably fitted conveniently into her purse. Once, I noted it lying on her coffee table, and I realized its significance. I recall noting pencil annotations, although I did not touch the book. So, I surmise that book still exists somewhere, perhaps in the Archives. If so, I wonder if her Las Vegas annotations are included in "Petrified Man."4 Hunter McKelva Cole Brandon, Mississippi Notes 1. According to the website of the Association of American University Presses, the New Orleans meeting was in 1985, the same year The Southern Review celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 2. "Für Elise," Beethoven's Bagatelle No. 25, is featured in Welty's short story "June Recital" in The Golden Apples. 3. "Petrified Man." Southern Review, vol. 4, Spring 1939, pp. 682–95. 4. In the Modern Library edition of Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1954, the very copy Cole noted at Welty's house, added at the bottom of page 44 to replace the line "She's a beautician," Welty wrote, "Listen, she won 2nd prize at the Convention for the best Fantasy Comb-Out." One does smile at the thought that she also spontaneously amended her reading with the name of that prize-winning comb-out. Copyright © 2021 Department of English, Georgia State University

Rameses III King of Egypt: his life and afterlife. By Aidan Dodson. 295mm. Pp 189, 131 col and b/w figs. The American University Press, Cairo, 2019.isbn9789774169403. £29.95 (hbk).

Rameses III King of Egypt: his life and afterlife. By Aidan Dodson. 295mm. Pp 189, 131 col and b/w figs. The American University Press, Cairo, 2019.<scp>isbn</scp>9789774169403. £29.95 (hbk).

Disciplinary Permeability, Academic Specializations, and University Presses

University presses select and publish intellectually significant scholarship. As they each occupy disciplinary space, particular to their publishing and editorial missions, university presses consider manuscripts per respective brands and imprimatur. This presentation will examine subject specialization within the larger context of disciplinary formation and disciplinary alignments university presses consider within their purview. To gain a greater appreciation of their missions in subject specialization, a definitional model will animate further discussion of publication trends, and disciplinary nomenclature utilized by university presses to capture their emphases within the constellation of scholarly publishing. Methodology and discussion will focus on data gleaned from the 2018 Directory of Association of American University Presses. Via a bibliometric approach, comparison with earlier Directories will situate discussion within the wider frame of disciplinary specialization growth. Disciplinary subjects and disciplinary nomenclature will constitute the focus of discussion as central to university press monographic publication trends. Special emphasis and illustrations will focus on fragmentation, hyper-specialization, and trends accommodating emerging scholarly domains, especially disciplinary permeability. Further broached vis-a-vis academic publishing and corresponding influence on scholars, especially, humanities scholars, as they navigate the scholarly communication system, exemplified by university presses.

Las editoriales universitarias iberoamericanas: una aproximación a su perfil y a sus procesos de selección de originales

Se realiza un acercamiento al perfil de las editoriales universitarias latinoamericanas en cuanto al volumen y tipo de libros que editan y al proceso de selección de los originales que siguen. Para realizar este trabajo se diseñó y envió un cuestionario a todas las editoriales universitarias latinoamericanas integradas en EULAC a través de las distintas asociaciones nacionales de editoriales universitarias. De las 310 editoriales a las que se invitó a participar contestaron 87 (tasa de respuesta: 26,6%). Los datos obtenidos se pusieron en comparación con el sector editorial universitario en España. Entre las conclusiones más destacadas se pueden señalar las siguientes: las editoriales universitarias de América Latina son muy desiguales en cuanto a su volumen de publicación y a su profesionalización; la mayoría de estas editoriales publican libros científicos, tesis y libros de divulgación; a diferencia de las españolas, se publican menos manuales docentes; el interés científico de la obra prima sobre otro tipo de criterios y el sistema de revisión por expertos es el más empleado para la evaluación y selección de libros científicos (76%); la web de las editoriales es entendida como una forma de difundir el catálogo de la editorial, pero no como una forma de dar a conocer los procesos editoriales a los autores, informando de estas cuestiones tan solo el 33% de las editoriales. La mayoría de las editoriales asumen en su totalidad el coste de la edición.

The Art of No

The author describes some of the more unusual author requests she has had to refuse in her years as an acquisitions editor. The essay comes from a talk the author gave at the 2016 annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses for a panel called This Acquisitions Life.

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

A Personal Tribute to Shigeo Minowa: A Japanese Renaissance Man Passes

The day turned bleak after I received a telephone call early in the morning on 18 September 2013 informing me that Shigeo Minowa had departed from this world on 30 August at the venerable age of eighty-seven. His distraught family had chosen to immediately inform only a small circle of family and intimate friends of his passing and to convey the sad tidings at a later date to his many colleagues, collaborators, and acquaintances in the worlds of scholarly book publishing, the study of book culture, higher education, and international communication. And so I came to learn of the departure of a dear friend, colleague, and collaborator, as well as mentor and former boss. Shigeo Minowa was a very unusual person in so many ways. For one, he skillfully demonstrated how a person could be simultaneously an intrepid and astute innovator, businessman, and entrepreneur, and a consummate scholar and internationalist, a concept readily given lip service in Japan, but finding an epitome in Minowa. Born in Tokyo in 1926, he entered the prestigious University of Tokyo and graduated in 1950 from the faculty of economics. He initiated his entry into the world of publishing books as a business and as a means of disseminating scholarship when he created, in collaboration with two former classmates, his first job by establishing the University of Tokyo Press in 1951. The press, a private enterprise affiliated with the University of Tokyo, went on to become the largest and most successful university press in Japan and one of the premier university presses in the world. It was one of the first non–US-based presses to become a member of the Association of American University Presses while Minowa was at the helm as managing director. Eager to see Japan become more international and for the press to play a key role in

Paul Tabar, Greg Noble, and Scott Poynting, On Being Lebanese in Australia: Identity, Racism, and the Ethnic Field. (Beirut: Institute for Migration Studies/Lebanese American University Press, 2010).

Paul Tabar, Greg Noble, and Scott Poynting, On Being Lebanese in Australia: Identity, Racism, and the Ethnic Field. (Beirut: Institute for Migration Studies/Lebanese American University Press, 2010).

Politics is a Game of Chance

No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold American Narratives Steven Belletto Oxford University Press, 2012. 206 pages Damjana Mraovie-O'Hare At recent Cold studies conference, it was postulated that the Cold might no longer be the crucial organizing event of the twentieth century Those who asserted this claimed that the Cold is losing its historiographic prominence to environmentalism and postcolonialism, two approaches that currently dominate the discussion of the last century. (1) Since its end was signaled the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold has existed as finished rather than an ongoing struggle. And while it is fair to doubt that many people long for the time of imminent nuclear threats, something interesting has happened with the Cold War: it has become an academic topic that it is possible to discuss without primary reference to the ideological or political positions that drove this struggle. In his wittily titled study, No Accident, Comrade, Steven Belletto dissects the rhetoric of the Cold in such manner. Belletto argues that the concept of chance politicized during the Cold War and therefore helped establish a new kind of relationship between aesthetics and politics (4). By analyzing literary fiction of the period, Belletto demonstrates that chance is commonly associated in American works with democratic freedom, while its preclusion--and even its manipulation--characterize the totalitarian system of the former USSR. Consequently, Belletto argues, chance became a complex, elastic concept whose self-reflexive use fiction writers and other cultural producers generated questions about freedom, control, and narrative's fundamental ability to represent or otherwise engage objective (5). Belletto opens his study with powerful example from The Future is Ours, Comrade (1960) Jerzy Kosinski. the Polish emigre who came to the US to study in the doctoral program in sociology at Columbia University, and who managed to secure book deal with Doubleday only eight months after he landed. A Russian speaker who drew on his notes from research trip to the former USSR, Kosinski wrote book that not only explained the Soviet Union to Americans but also became everything that an American propaganda agency, or the propaganda arm of the CIA, might have hoped for in its wildest dreams (4). In his book, Kosinski claims that in the Soviet Union objective reality is supervised so thoroughly that it seems as if the accidental has ceased to exist. He supports this claim with an anecdote about Aliosha, Soviet military officer whose private fails to show up for morning call after festive night. Facing dilemma between immediately reporting the soldier or covering for his absence in the name of human sympathy, the officer decides on the latter course and brings in another private to take the absentee's place. After the third day, the officer receives note saying that his platoon will be inspected, and is crestfallen at this cruel turn of fate. Still, he proceeds to cover for the missing soldier; during the inspection, by his substitute is questioned and Aliosha exposed. In the end, it turns out that the soldier was deliberately pulled out of Aliosha's platoon counterintelligence officers who wanted to test their subordinates' willingness to follow the protocol for missing personnel. Kosinski uses the story to illustrate that the Soviet system has infiltrated everyday life to such an extent that chance does not exist at all. Belletto argues that chance, in fact, becomes evidence of planning (5), and the entire Soviet reality fiction. In this version of things, Soviet reality is not only always open for interpretation but also, in the Cold context, directly opposes the rhetoric of American democracy, with its emphases on individualism, liberty, and freedom. This anecdote, included in the first, theoretical chapter of Belletto's book, Chance, Narrative, and the Logic of the Cold War, frames the entire study, functioning as background against which his case studies can be read. …

Harry Oosterhuis and Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstras, Verward van geest en ander ongerief: psychiatrie en geestelijke gezondheidszorg in Nederland (1870–2005), 3 vols, Houten, Bohn Stafleu van Loghum, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, 2008, pp. xxvi, 1522, €135.00 (hardback 978-90-313-5238-8).

This study is the result of a collaborative research project funded by the Dutch Council for Scientific Research (NWO), which started in 1999. As well as this mammoth-size study, the research group published a series of comparative volumes and separate studies on more specific issues, which have brought the historiography of Dutch psychiatry to a level that is unsurpassed by that of other nations. The crowning glory of this work is this general overview of psychiatry in the Netherlands since 1870 by the project leaders, Harry Oosterhuis of the University of Maastricht, and Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, professor emeritus of the University of Amsterdam. Considering the strong international focus of the project, it is to be deplored that this final study is written in Dutch, also because an English or American university press might have been able to persuade the authors to write more concisely and more explicitly about the specifics of Dutch psychiatry in comparison with that of other western countries.

American University Presses, 1929–1979: Adaptation and Evolution

Drawing primarily on a set of reports produced at intervals between 1929 and 1979, this article examines the ideas and forces that shaped the development of American university presses as part of the system of scholarship and education over this period and beyond. It focuses in particular on questions of mission and funding to demonstrate the challenges presses have faced from their earliest days in fulfilling their mandate, and how the nature of their activities evolved within a set of imperatives and constraints determined by trends in the larger academic, publishing, and philanthropic environments.

All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt, by Khaled Fahmy. New York: The American University Press, 2002. (First published by Cambridge University Press, 1997). 334 pages, illustrations, bibliography, index. US$29.50 (Paper) ISBN 977-424-696-9

All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt, by Khaled Fahmy. New York: The American University Press, 2002. (First published by Cambridge University Press, 1997). 334 pages, illustrations, bibliography, index. US$29.50 (Paper) ISBN 977-424-696-9 - Volume 40 Issue 2

The information gulag: Rethinking openness in times of national danger

Abstract The founding fathers of the United States recognized that freely available information and an educated citizenry were essential to the functioning of a representative democracy. But almost as soon as the ink dried on the Constitution, political forces moved, and have continued to move, to restrict the flow of information from the government to the public, as well as among members of the public. This article examines whether information availability has become a victim of the war on terrorism – whether the nation has entered a time in which legal and policy initiatives are creating information gulags – secreting government information and restricting communications among members of the public, including the academic community. This article explores how policy is shaping the information relationship among the government, the public, academia, and the media and whether new models may be appropriate and more beneficial to society. In doing so, we examine in depth not only public access to government information but also the emerging and vital issue of government restrictions on scholarly exchange, as most recently presented by the legal dispute between the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), Department of Treasury, and subsequently the litigation brought by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP).

LAWSUIT TARGETS TREASURY RULES

THE SIMMERING DISPUTE over restrictions on publishing has boiled over again, with four groups suing the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in federal court in New York City on Sept. 27. The plaintiffs are the Association of American Publishers' Professional & Scholarly Publishing (AAP/PSP) Division, the Association of American University Presses, PEN American Center, and Arcade Publishing. The American Chemical Society, through its membership in AAP, is participating in the suit. The society is providing $25,000 in financial backing for the effort. In a joint statement, the plaintiffs say they are asking the court to strike down OFAC regulations that require publishers and authors to seek a license from the to perform the routine activities necessary to publish foreign literature from embargoed countries such as Iran, Cuba, and the Sudan in the U.S. It violates the First Amendment, and government should not be requiring a ...

My Turn: Reading the Agenda of the 2003 Annual AAUP Directors' Meeting to Discover What's Wrong With University Press Publishing

One of the hardest tasks for my authors is to step out of their disciplinary isolation and give me a one-liner about their book that will make sense to the average intelligent reader. It’s not that these bright people can’t accomplish the task, but after having been trained to communicate in highly specific (and therefore often exclusionary) ways, it can be hard for them to surface long enough to see the big picture. So too I believe that university presses have developed ways of communicating among ourselves that reinforce stereotypes about what we do, who our masters are, and where we believe our activity ranks in the ever-shifting sands of university fiscal priorities. A notable example of this is the meticulously crafted agenda for the annual directors’ meeting held in conjunction with the 2003 annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP). At the outset, I offer my apologies to those who crafted the document (they do not deserve to have their words picked apart like this!). Admittedly without full regard to the valuable substance of the discussions at the meeting, I hope to draw attention to the way our presumably innocent use of language is working against us in these troubled times. Battle lines are quite literally drawn by the agenda’s title, ‘Tales from the Front Lines.’ This is to be a meeting for beleaguered warriors eager to continue fighting the good fight.

Books for Understanding: The History So Far of AAUP's On-line Public Information Resource

Within days of the 11 September, 2001 terrorist attacks, Penn State University Press was swamped with queries about two backlist scholarly titles, Terrorism in Context and The Holy War Idea in Islamic and Western Thought. Sanford Thatcher, director of Penn State's press, knew that other university presses had published similar books and had an idea. On 13 September, Thatcher e-mailed the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), and suggested that AAUP compile a short bibliography of relevant books to post online at www.aaupnet.org. Six months later, under the rubric ‘Books for Understanding,’ that bibliography contained listings for 671 titles from sixty-five non-profit scholarly presses, and had provided the foundation for a dynamic permanent public information resource.

Books and Catalogues in Brief

Books reviewed in this section are:Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German ModernismLouis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi, What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn RandAshok Roy, (ed) National Gallery Technical Bulletin Volume 21Mary D Garrard, Artemesia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic IdentityElizabeth Valdez del Alamo ,(ed) Memory and the Medieval TombDavid Lomas The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, SubjectivityAlexandra Munroe and Jon Hendricks, Yes: Yoko OnoHelen McDonald, Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in ArtAnita Fiderer Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture c.1250–c.1450Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney: PaintingsPeter Kennedy Scott, A Romantic Look at Norwich School Landscapes by a Handful of Great Little MastersPaul Hayes Tucker, The Impressionists at ArgenteuilNancy Spector, (ed) Guggenheim Museum Collection A to ZPhilip Nord, Impressionists and Politics — Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth CenturyLisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and WestStephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein and Ilene Susan Fort, (eds) Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000Mary Rogers, (ed) Fashioning Identities in Renaissance ArtCarmen Bambach, et al Correggion and Parmigianino: Master Draughtsmen of the RenaissancePierre Francastel, Art and Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth CenturiesIsabelle Frank ,The Theory of Decorative Art. An Anthology of European and American Writings, 1750–1940Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska, Feminist Visual CultureRobert O'Byrne, Hugh Lane: 1875–1915 American University Presses Directory 2000–2001 Foreword by John Edwards, 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio

From Gutenberg to Gateway: Electronic Publishing at University Presses

Using the results from a publishers&amp;apos survey conducted in June 1999 of the Association of American University Presses, Jennifer Siler creates a baseline record of university presses' current involvement in electronic publishing. Scholarly publishers launch electronic publishing projects for a variety of purposes, such as marketing and discussion tools for clothbound books, teaching and research tools for specialized markets, the timeliness of the electronic form (including the ability to update the material with relative ease), and the capability of on-demand printing. Other scholarly publishers prefer not to participate in forms of electronic publishing because of the need for specially trained staff, the additional cost of the technology and labour, a perceived limited market, and, in some cases, a lack of appropriate product for the electronic form. Siler argues that, given the rapid changes in technology and the developing trend towards electronic dissemination of research, publishers will have to be prepared to provide their markets with the markets' format of choice. Siler concludes that the book will nevertheless survive the new technology as it has in the past.

The Association of American University Presses

The Association of American University Presses has long been the collective voice for University Presses. With the advent of the Internet, new possibilities have arisen that allow these presses, large and small, to make their presence and publications known to both libraries and the general public. The AAUP has developed a website that brings together catalogs from a variety of different presses, and has made them searchable in a variety of ways. It is now possible to search and browse by key subject word, title, or author of all the participating presses at once or to search individual presses. The search engine offers expanded access points into their catalogs, aiding in collection development and acquisitions. Online ordering information discusses options the buyer has to purchase the materials.