In addition to our booth in the MLA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Literary Studies at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Literary Studies titles with discount code S24XMLA through our virtual exhibit ».
Continue reading "Modern Language Association Conference 2024" »
In addition to our booth in the AHA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of History at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S24XAHA through our virtual exhibit ».
Continue reading "American Historical Association Conference 2024" »
In addition to our booth in the AJS exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Jewish Studies at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off on listed SUP Jewish Studies titles with discount code S23XAJS through our virtual exhibit ».
Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa »
AOMAR BOUM, ILLUSTRATED BY NADJIB BERBER
Continue reading "ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES CONFERENCE 2023" »
We offer this virtual space in addition to our AAA booth to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of anthropology publishing at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Anthropology titles with discount code S23XAAA through our virtual exhibit ».
Continue reading "American Anthropological Association Conference 2023" »
A recommended reading list on toys, the atomic bomb, and the unlikely intersection of the two
Continuously in demand since its first, prize-winning edition was published in 1975, this is the classic history of the development of the American atomic bomb, the decision to use it against Japan, and the origins of U.S. atomic diplomacy toward the Soviet Union.
In his Preface to this new edition, the author describes and evaluates the lengthening trail of new evidence that has come to light concerning these often emotionally debated subjects. The author also invokes his experience as a historical advisor to the controversial, aborted 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. This leads him to analyze the impact on American democracy of one of the most insidious of the legacies of Hiroshima: the political control of historical interpretation.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off recent SUP Sociology titles with discount code S23XASA through our virtual exhibit ».
Please enjoy this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Law at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Law titles with discount code S23XLSA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
Continue reading "Law and Society Association Conference 2023" »
Embracing the flexibility of an under-utilized resource
Your table of contents is not just an outline–it is an overlooked, underappreciated marketing and sales tool. An editor will use your table of contents to evaluate your book proposal. They will share it with marketing colleagues and their Editorial Board, to rally support. Your publisher’s sales team will share it with retailers. Marketers will post it to Amazon and online stores around the world. Foreign language rights managers will use it to persuade publishers in China, Germany, or Brazil to translate your book into their language.
But you also want a captivating table of contents for your most important audience–your reader. Readers deciding whether or not to buy your book will look at the cover and the marketing copy, and perhaps skim chapter 1, but they will also browse your table of contents. Will it grab their interest or not? I’m a business book editor, and when I’m working with an author, I ask them to picture a browsing reader scanning the table of contents online or in a bookstore, deciding whether or not the book is worth their valuable time. A book I published called The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy received a rave review in the New York Times, including praise for the author’s “beguilingly titled subchapters.” That’s the response we want from a reader browsing the table of contents!
Creating a polished, marketing-oriented, reader-friendly table of contents, is a way of getting to know your audience better.
So I encourage you to put on your marketing/copywriter hat for an hour and finesse your chapter titles. This requires a mental shift, since you have been thinking about the internal coherence and narrative flow of your argument. You don’t want frothy chapter titles that undercut the scholarly rigor of your work. But you strongly believe in your book and you care about connecting deeply with your reader and their concerns. Think about which of your book’s topics, ideas, claims, and themes your readers care about most. Whatever those are…they should show up, stated clearly, in your chapter titles.
Continue reading "Your Table Of Contents is a Marketing Tool" »
We hope you enjoy this virtual space showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Latin American Studies at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off select SUP Latin American Studies titles .
To use the discount select titles from our virtual exhibit », and enter coupon code S23XLASA-FM at checkout.
Continue reading "Latin American Studies Association 2023" »
Top Films from SUP Authors
Contrary to popular belief, we’re not always buried in a book. Sometimes, we’re buried in a film. We reached out to a few of our authors to tell us about some of their favorite films – films that inspired their research, or films that they just happened to enjoy.
In Elia Suleiman’s debut feature, the director plays a version of himself, E.S., an expat Palestinian filmmaker attempting to piece together the fragmented story of a journey home and match it up with hilarious and poignant vignettes of life under occupation. Suleiman opts for deadpan humor to convey trauma and absurdity. An inheritor of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, Suleiman speaks volumes even though E.S. hardly utters a word in the entire film. When asked for a speech, E.S. finds himself drowned out by feedback from the microphones that are supposed to amplify his voice.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a visionary 21st century filmmaker, whose debut feature, Mysterious Object at Noon, was released in the year 2000. Memoria is nominally about an investigation into a mysterious loud sound that awakens Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an expat living in Columbia. Her search for an explanation leads her on an inner and outer journey that explores various secular and supernatural origins for the possible source of the uncanny sound. Personal and collective trauma bleeds into haunted places and lives whose histories are somehow joined across the world. There is no return home, only further openings into the unknown.
Contributed by J. M. Tyree, author of Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London.
Joshua recently contributed his own top ten list to the BFI.
You can explore his top picks here.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S23XOAH-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
Shelley S. Lee wrote a special entry on our blog about Koreatown, L.A. and landmarks. Given that OAH is in Los Angeles this year, we hope this entry is of special interest.
Start reading KOREATOWN LANDMARKS OF THE PAST AND PRESENT »
Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, newspapers in the United States—even newspapers which were not published by a religious denomination or organization—made frequent recourse to the Bible. Newspapers printed sermons and Sunday school lessons. They featured jokes whose punchlines required familiarity with the Bible and aired political commentary that cited the Bible on all sides of a given issue.
America's Public Bible is an interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. When the Bible was cited on one side or the other of an issue, only rarely was its meaning explicated rather than assumed. Those who cited the text most typically thought that their readers would understand its meaning precisely as they did. But the multiple and mutually exclusive ways in which newspapers used the Bible test that assumption. By identifying and studying quotations in American newspapers, the site offers a commentary on how the Bible was used in public life, uncovering trends and patterns that would be invisible to a single scholar's reading of these documents.
Continue reading "Organization of American Historians Meeting 2023" »
We hope you enjoy this virtual space, which showcases our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of International Studies at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP International Studies titles with discount code S23XISA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
An Interview with SUP’s Sarah Rodriguez
When people learn that I work at University Press, I receive all sorts of questions. They’re always very curious about what it’s like to consider manuscripts. But I don’t consider manuscripts. (People in marketing don’t consider manuscripts.) So, I redirected the question to an Editorial Assistant, Sarah, because they actually do consider the manuscripts.
We discussed Sarah’s interest in culture and media studies, their background in creative writing, and the space of a University Press.
KAPANI KIRKLAND: Hi. How's it going?
SARAH RODRIGUEZ: Hi. It's going good.
KK: Good. So, you work on projects. You work on books. Is there something that you're working on that you're excited about?
SR: I feel like Dylan and Marcella both have lists that are aligned with my interests. (Dylan and Marcela are my two mentors.) I come from an anthropology background, so most of the projects in that list are exciting. I got to make notes on a project that discusses the marginalization of Black cemeteries. We wanted to see if some creative nonfiction elements were working, and some of my notes helped with the revision. It was cool… I felt like an actual editor.
Continue reading "I Pestered an Editorial Assistant So You Don’t Have to" »
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A conversation with SUP’s Art Director, Michele Wetherbee.
I’m one of SUP’s newest members on the marketing team. Since the beginning of my time here, I’ve been curious about the process of choosing artwork for our titles.
I tracked down our Art Director, Michele Wetherbee, to ask her a few questions. In this interview, she explains what makes design at a University Press unique. She also walks me through the process of how a design for a book gets chosen…
Kapani Kirkland: I understand that you’re new here, right? Both to Stanford University Press and the world of academic publishing?
Michele Wetherbee: Yes, on both accounts. I've designed and art-directed books in trade publishing at HarperOne, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Chronicle Books, and many smaller trade publishers, but I haven’t worked with a University Press.
KK: What are your impressions, especially if you compare academic publishing to trade?
MW: I'm enjoying University Press publishing a lot. Designing in a new field and building a fantastically talented freelance staff is, and has been, invigorating. In trade publishing, especially Big Five publishing, there are big expectations with extreme pressure. Trade covers are part of a commercial service: a cover sells a book in the same way that a wine label sells wine, or a beer label will sell beer.
Ideally, the book cover or wine label is an honest reflection of the content; at other times, we sell a dream.
Authors desire a powerful and reflective cover design; however, at Stanford, our covers must accurately reflect the content. I’ve quickly understood that romanticism or broad cultural brushstrokes aren’t appropriate here.
KK: What (or who) are your influences as a designer? And what will be your design voice be at SUP?
MW: I love honesty in design, that which is created with a pure, clear voice. I find a honed simplicity to be the most powerful, especially when it is packed with rich meaning simmering beneath the surface, inviting the viewer’s imagination to engage.
I’m a designer because I love creating and being surrounded by beauty. That beauty can be spatial relationships on a cover, or the relationships of an architectural space. Some covers call for the rich beauty of old maps and calligraphy or a tactile, hand-created heirloom jewel. I’m drawn to the tension of creating power and beauty while working with brutal or dystopian subjects.
About the Blog
The SUP blog showcases new books and Press news in addition to serving as a forum for our authors—past and present—to expound on issues related to their scholarship. Views expressed by guest contributors to the blog do not necessarily represent those of Stanford University or Stanford University Press, and all guest contributions are denoted by a byline and an author bio.
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