Past Events - Hot Off the Press
Hot Off The Press brings to campus acquisitions editors and authors of recently published books to discuss their work and the publishing process with faculty and graduate students.
2023
Jason Weidemann
Editorial Director
University of Minnesota Press
Friday, April 14, 2023 (two events)
As part of the Kaplan Humanities Institute's ongoing commitment to help humanities faculty and graduate students in their research endeavors, Kaplan will host notable editor Jason Weidemann, Editorial Director at University of Minnesota Press, for two targeted events on the academic publishing process: 1) A breakfast for graduate students and 2) a lunch for faculty.
Weidemann acquires books in anthropology, Asian studies, media studies, geography, interdisciplinary Native and Indigenous studies, and sociology, and he is also head of the Press’s scholarly journals.
Weidemann acquires books in anthropology, Asian studies, media studies, geography, interdisciplinary Native and Indigenous studies, and sociology, and he is also head of the Press’s scholarly journals.
Graduate Student Breakfast
Friday, April 14, 2023
9:00 - 10:00 am
Kresge #2350 (Kaplan Institute)
How might humanities scholars get books published? Join us for this breakfast conversation with Jason Weidemann on the publishing process and its practicalities. This event is offered first-come/first-served to all Northwestern graduate students in the humanities. Faculty Lunch
Friday, April 14, 2023
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Kresge #2350 (Kaplan Institute)
Jason Weidemann will be in conversation with Kaplan Interim Director Kelly Wisecup. Together they will discuss—and offer advice for faculty about—the publishing process and promoting work to editors: prepping and pitching manuscripts; best practices for engaging academic presses; practical advice for organizing book proposals, scheduling time, and planning years out. Lunch will be served, and there will be plenty of time for questions!2022
Courtney Berger
Executive Editor
Duke University Press
Publishing a first book with an academic press
Wed., March 30, 2022
Noon-1:30pm (via Zoom)
Courtney Berger is Executive Editor at Duke University Press. She joined the Press in 2003, after receiving her Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins University. Courtney acquires books across the humanities and interpretive social sciences. She seeks out books that are theoretically and politically engaged and that speak to a wide, interdisciplinary audience, and she enjoys collaborating with first-time authors who are in the process of establishing their critical voice.
2021
Caelyn Cobb
Editor, Global History and Politics
Columbia University Press
Publishing a first book with an academic press
Friday, April 16, 2021
Noon-1:30pm (via Zoom)
Are you working on your first book manuscript? Come learn about prepping and pitching manuscripts, and the Dos and Don’ts of engaging academic presses. Caelyn Cobb, editor for global history and politics at Columbia University Press, will give you the insider scoop and answer any questions you have.
2019
Kate Wahl
Publishing Director and Editor-in-Chief
Stanford University Press
A panel discussion on academic book publishing
Thursday, October 3, 2019
12:00 noon - 1:30 pm (lunch served)
Kaplan Seminar Room, Kresge 2351
2017-2018
Alan G. Thomas
Editorial Director of Humanities and Social Sciences
The University of Chicago Press
How to Publish Your Book in 18 Months
Friday, November 10, 2017
12:00 noon - 1:30 pm (lunch served)
Kaplan Humanities Institute, Kresge Hall #2350
Alan Thomas is Editorial Director for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago Press. Over his thirty-year career as an acquisitions editor at Chicago, he has published a broad range of scholarly books in the humanities as well as fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, and photography. His authors have won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Modern Language Association’s Lowell Prize, and the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, among many other awards. Alan is a contributor to Places Journal and has published on literature and photography in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Design Observer. He lectures widely on issues in scholarly publishing.
2016-2017
Jerome E. Singerman
Senior Humanities Editor
University of Pennsylvania Press
The State of Academic Publishing
Friday, January 27, 2017
12:00 noon - 1:30 pm (lunch served)
Kaplan Humanities Institute, Kresge Hall #2350
Jerry Singerman received his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His academic training and teaching were in medieval and early modern literature, with an emphasis on French and English. At University of Pennsylvania Press, he oversees lists in medieval and early modern studies, as well as the history of the book, Jewish Studies, late antiquity, British and American literature, and the history and theory of landscape architecture. Singerman is the recipient of the 2014 Kindrick-CARA Service Award of the Medieval Academy of America.
2015-2016
William Germano
Dean and Professor
The Cooper Union
Writing As If You Mean It:
Scholars, Books, and the Dream of Usable Scholarship
January 29, 2016
12:00 noon - 1:30 pm (lunch served)
Harris Hall, Room 108
William Germano received his B.A. from Columbia and his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. He studies and writes on intellectual production, the material culture of the book, and literature and the allied arts. He is particularly interested in the writing life of scholars, a subject he has written on in Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 2008), and From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press, 2005, 2nd ed. 2013).
His essays have appeared in PMLA, minnesota review, Scholarly Publishing, SPAN, Publishing Research Quarterly, PNR and other publications. Since 2012 he has been a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s language blog, Lingua Franca. His scholarly essays have appeared in Opera Quarterly, University of Toronto Quarterly, The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Two Conversations with Contemporary Critics (Columbia UP, 2012) and the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia (forthcoming).
For over twenty years he directed programs in scholarly publishing, first as editor-in-chief at Columbia University Press and then as vice-president and publishing director at Routledge; during his publishing career he developed wide experience with disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences. He has taught in the graduate program in publishing at NYU, is a frequent speaker at academic conferences, and has given workshops and seminars on professional scholarly writing across North America and in Europe, the Middle East, and New Zealand.
Germano teaches the freshman core courses and electives on Shakespeare, the history of the book, and opera at The Cooper Union. He is a trustee of The English Institute and a member of the Advisory Council of the Princeton University department of English.
(William Germano photo by Awol Erizku.)
Donald Waters
Senior Program Officer for Scholarly Communications
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The 'Monograph' in the Age of the Internet: A Progress Report on a Mellon Foundation Initiative
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
12:00 noon - 1:30 pm (lunch served)
Kaplan Institute Seminar Room
1800 Sherman Ave. Suite 1-200
Donald J. Waters is the Senior Program Officer for Scholarly Communications at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Before joining the Foundation, he served as the first Director of the Digital Library Federation (1997-1999), and as Associate University Librarian at Yale University (1993-1997). Waters graduated with a Bachelor's degree in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1973. In 1982, he received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University. In 1995-96, he co-chaired the Task Force of the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group on Archiving of Digital Information. In 2005-2008, Waters served on the Library of Congress Section 108 Study Group. He currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Networked Information, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Monday, May 11, 2015
About Fiction Beyond Secularism: Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight. In Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman argues that contemporary novelists who are most commonly identified as antireligious—among them Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Haruki Murakami, and J. M. Coetzee—have defied assumptions and have instead written some of the most trenchant critiques of secular ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination. As a result, many readers (or nonreaders) on either side of the religious divide neglect the insights of works like The Satanic Verses, Disgrace, and Snow. Fiction Beyond Secularism serves as a timely corrective.
Professor Justin Neuman: "My research and teaching focus on global Anglophone literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am currently at work on two book projects. Fiction Beyond Secularism: World Literature Since 1979 investigates the rise of religion in the past quarter century through novels that take an idea of the global as a primary theme and ultimate frame of reference. In an era when religions consistently exceed the boundaries policed by secular modernity, global fictions reveal the ongoing processes by which the claims of secularity are contested and reformulated as novelists negotiate ethical life in a pluralist world. My second project, Energy Systems Literature, uses an interdisciplinary approach to corporate archives and literary fictions in order to track the shifting ways writers, companies, and governments have imagined petroleum and the social, political, historical, and environmental transformations wrought by its extraction and consumption."
Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication Studies
In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke University Press)
2014-2015
Justin Neuman
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Yale University
Fiction Beyond Secularism
Monday, May 11, 2015
4:30 pm
Kaplan Institute Seminar Room
1800 Sherman Ave. Suite 1-200
About Fiction Beyond Secularism: Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight. In Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman argues that contemporary novelists who are most commonly identified as antireligious—among them Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Haruki Murakami, and J. M. Coetzee—have defied assumptions and have instead written some of the most trenchant critiques of secular ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination. As a result, many readers (or nonreaders) on either side of the religious divide neglect the insights of works like The Satanic Verses, Disgrace, and Snow. Fiction Beyond Secularism serves as a timely corrective. Professor Justin Neuman: "My research and teaching focus on global Anglophone literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am currently at work on two book projects. Fiction Beyond Secularism: World Literature Since 1979 investigates the rise of religion in the past quarter century through novels that take an idea of the global as a primary theme and ultimate frame of reference. In an era when religions consistently exceed the boundaries policed by secular modernity, global fictions reveal the ongoing processes by which the claims of secularity are contested and reformulated as novelists negotiate ethical life in a pluralist world. My second project, Energy Systems Literature, uses an interdisciplinary approach to corporate archives and literary fictions in order to track the shifting ways writers, companies, and governments have imagined petroleum and the social, political, historical, and environmental transformations wrought by its extraction and consumption."