Kudos to Robert J. Richards, the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago, for a recent accolade: the Sarton Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the History of Science Society (HSS).

Named after George Sarton, a founder of the HSS, the Sarton Medal is "the highest honor conferred by the History of Science Society, in recognition of a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar, selected from the international community."

Richards's credentials? Besides authoring Laing Prize-winners The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (2008) and The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (2002), Richards has also penned The Meaning of Evolution (1992) and Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (1987, and winner of the Pfizer Prize from the HSS for the best book in the history of science). In addition, he's coedited two collections: Darwinian Heretics (with Abigail Lustig and Michael Ruse) and the Cambridge Companion to Darwin's Origin of Species (also with Michael Ruse).

From the Sarton Medal release:

Professor Richards holds an MA in biological psychology (University of Nebraska), a PhD in philosophy (St. Louis University) and a PhD in the history of science (University of Chicago). He has served as the director of the Fishbein Center for the History of Science at the University of Chicago since 1992 and was appointed the Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science in 2004. He holds appointments in the Department of History, in the Department of Philosophy, in the Department of Psychology, and in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. Professor Richards received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and was made a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen in 2010. The University of Chicago has bestowed on Professor Richards numerous awards for teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level. The University appointed him Distinguished Service Professor in 2011, and Ryerson Memorial Lecturer in 2005.

From Goethe and Humboldt to Haeckel and Herbert Spencer —Richards reminds us of the importance of the history of ideas as they relate to mind and behavior. And for that, it seems that this hearty congrats might be long overdue.

Archived in Awards | History and Philosophy of Science
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Marshall Sahlins—globally renowned ethnographer, Polynesian historian, and the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus) at the University of Chicago—has had quite a series of weeks.

First came notice from the French Ministry of Culture, helmed by Frédéric Mitterand: Sahlins has been named a Chevalier des Arts et des Letters (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters), an honorary position that commends artists, scholars, and others who have contributed "to the enrichment of French culture."

In addition, Sahlins is set to receive not one—but, two—honorary doctorates, from the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.

In addition, the Sorbonne will host a daylong conference on Monday, November 14, 2011, in celebration of Sahlins and his work, featuring contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers from around the world.

The author of numerous books (an assortment of which have been translated into French,
including The Western Illusion of Human Nature), Sahlins is also the executive publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press. Among those books of Sahlins published by the University of Chicago Press are Culture and Practical Reason, winner of the Gordon J. Laing Prize; How Natives "Think": About Captain Cook, For Example; Islands of History; Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa; and the two-volume Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (coauthored with Patrick V. Kirch).

Sahlins personal ties to France are notable—in the late 1960s, he experienced the May 1968 student protests firsthand, while studying with anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss at his Laboratoire at the College de France. Later, Sahlins returned as the sole American participant in the ceremonies celebrating Lévi-Strauss's 100th birthday in 2009.

Quipped Sahlins in acknowledgement of the honors:

"I think I am the Jerry Lewis of French anthropology. The French love me, and the Americans can't understand why."

Photo by Alan Thomas

Archived in Anthropology | Awards | Books for the News
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’Tis the season for award announcements and prize citations, and we're delighted to announced several recent winners and acknowledge their achievements.

We begin with an award close to home: the Gordon J. Laing Prize, which is awarded annually by the University of Chicago Press (since 1963) to the faculty author, editor, or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction. This year, we honor Robert J. Richards for The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought.

Continue reading "Awards, fellowships, and recent accolades" »

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
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Yesterday afternoon, the Poetry Foundation announced their 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner: David Ferry, our own Phoenix Poet and author of three collections published by the University of Chicago Press. The Lilly Poetry Prize is presented annually to a living American poet whose lifetime accomplishments "warrant extraordinary recognition." No small award, this: at $100,000, it is one of the nation's largest and most coveted literary prizes. With all of that in mind, we extend our warmest congratulations to Professor Ferry on this remarkable achievement.

From Poetry editor Christian Wiman's Lilly Prize citation:

"David Ferry is probably best known as a translator—and his achievements in that regard are extraordinary—but I think in the end it will be his poems that last," said Wiman. "In a time when most poetry relies on intense surface energy, Ferry's effects are muted and subterranean—but then, in their cumulative effect, seismic. For 50 years he has practiced poetry as if it truly matters to our lives and to our souls—and now his poems have that rare power to wake us up to both."

We celebrate David Ferry as the author of Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations, Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, and Strangers: A Book of Poems, each of which have been published under the Phoenix Poets imprint. The emeritus Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English at Wellesley College, Ferry is a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University, as well as a distinguished visiting scholar at Suffolk University. He has previously been awarded numerous awards and fellowships, throughout his notable career, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and an Academy Award for Literature form the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Phoenix Poets series was inaugurated in 1982 by University of Chicago poetry and poetics professor Robert von Hallberg, and by 1983, had begun to publish an often eclectic and always erudite selection of American and UK-based poets. Books in the series have garnered almost every major poetry prize, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, and others. Now helmed by acquiring editor Randolph Petilos and an anonymous board of editors, Phoenix Poets continues onward into a new century of formal ingenuity, depth of thought, quality of language, and poetic possibility.

Over at Scribd, we've curated a collection of Phoenix Poets titles, all available in ebook format (and discounted in celebration of National Poetry Month). Have a look and consider downloading a title or two, with a bit of praise from Philip Levine in mind:

"For the past several years, the University of Chicago has been publishing some of the finest books by the younger American poets. No other press, in New York or anywhere, is doing any better. In fact, I can't think of one that's done as well."

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | Poetry
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We're just settling in after our long winter's nap (in which we dream a dream very much like the College Art Association's annual meeting and centennial year launch in New York), chiding ourselves for forgetting to offer some important early February accolades.

Last week, at a ceremony in Washington, DC, the 2010 PROSE Awards were announced, honoring the best scholarly and professional publications in over forty categories, nominated by peer publishers, librarians, and science professionals.

Among them? The PROSE Award for U.S. History, handed out to Claude Fischer's Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character, in which Fischer draws upon decades worth of research to track our American "We" over the past three centuries. And we were just as delighted to see Courtney Bender's The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, a work that locates contemporary American spiritual beliefs in various nineteenth-century movements, take home the PROSE Award for Theology and Religious Studies.

And let's add kudos for our honorable mentions to this rousing chorus: Matthew Jesse Jackson's The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (Art History and Criticism), Alan D. Schrift's The History of Continental Philosophy (Multivolume Reference, Humanities and Social Science), Harvey G. Cohen's Duke Ellington's America (Music and the Performing Arts), and Christian Smith's What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Philosophy).

If you've needed an excuse to delve deeper into our newly revamped website in order to explore an option or two, this is the perfect excuse! With that invitation, we offer our most sincere congrats to all the winners and nominees:

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | History | Religion
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In 1919, the (literally) round table at New York's Algonquin Hotel first became fodder for the goings-about-town sections of literary journals and New York City dailies, as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and others (shoutout to Edna Ferber!) barbed wits while whittling their way through Prohibition, personal failures and successes ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") and other trappings of the times. In April 1974, in tribute to those well-quoted luminaries, three contemporary critics (John Leonard, Nona Balakian, and Ivan Sandrof) decided to extend their conversation about contemporary literature to the national level and thus, the National Book Critics Circle was formed.

Now, our foray, thirty-seven years after the fact:

Hearty congrats to Susie Linfield, author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism! In a banner year (Two university presses with nominees in the Criticism category! Independent publishers spread throughout the list!) for the NBCC, we couldn't be more delighted to celebrate what Artforum, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Nation, and many others have already acknowledged: Linfield's book is a tour-de-force polemic on the often intimate and always complex relationship between photography and political violence. Stay tuned, as this year's award winners will be announced on March 10th. Until then we, arm-in-arm with all of those critical commentators that comprise the NBCC, encourage you to celebrate Linfield and the other nominees the best way we know how—by urging you to read their praiseworthy tomes.

If you haven't yet found the time to check out this impassioned critical take on the history of violence and its bearings on modern photojournalism, excerpts from The Cruel Radiance are available online at Tablet and Guernica, in addition to on the book's University of Chicago Press site here.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
Posted by KAM at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It slipped through our fingers like sand through the hourglass! We nearly fainted with the outpouring of yearly best-of lists and insightful mentions. We're too overwhelmed to keep everything under wraps until Thursday next—we offer the below, with humility for the tardy appearance of this post and fervor for the warp and weft of a wrap-up of that week that was:

"This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays."

The Boston Globe reviews The Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, our most recent offering from the "outrageously prolific and always fascinating" economist and writer, Deirdre N. McCloskey. "The latest chapter in what has to be one of the most interesting scholarly careers in America today." We agree!

Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time finds worthy mention at the Atlantic's "The Best Book I Read This Year" series. "It's a particularly interesting book to read in one's twenties." Hey, we remember when we wrote at the Atlantic in our tw—wait, the Atlantic (Monthly)? Er, nevermind. That ship has sailed, Christopher Cross. That ship has sailed.

Jonathan Messinger commends Larry Bennett's The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism with a solid tagline in Time Out Chicago—"a fascinating portrait of the city."

Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud's Home and Offices, Vienna 1938, The Photographs of Edmund Engelman. We published it in 1976! It's one of the Art Newspaper's Best Books this Year! Better grab a copy fast before Doc Brown rewires the DeLorean to go BACK TO THE FUTURE!

Note to self: nuns still going wild. See here and here (a charming interview in the Boston Globe with Nuns Behaving Badly author Craig Monson).

The Chronicle of Higher Education is just as excited as we are about Nicole R. Fleetwood's Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Fleetwood, an American studies scholar at Rutgers University, analyzes a persistent presumption in American culture: that seeing blackness is problematic.

Do you follow the Millions and their "Year in Reading" feature? If you do, you've already seen Seth Mnookin drop Richard Stark's Parker novels as a worthy pursuit for your addictive tendencies and/or thief/antihero fixation. If they're good enough for James Franco, then truly: what more do you need?

Rebecca Messbarger, author of The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini, was recently featured in an extended profile devoted to her research and ideas at the Washington University site. As if her study of one of the Enlightenment's most renowned anatomical wax modelers and burgeoning feminist icons couldn't get more interesting, Messbarger has her own story to tell: "I should have been a doctor," she says. "I love reading anything about anatomy. I get so excited about it. I'm the person at the cocktail party who can't stop talking about their work." Three cheers, Rebecca!

Looking for gifts for Your Father, The Architect (film reference sleight of hand)? The San Francisco Chronicle recommends Blair Kamin's Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age (excerpt here), while the Wall Street Journal endorses Stanley Greenberg's Architecture under Construction (image gallery available here).

And finally, Ruth Franklin praises Robert K. Elder's "extraordinary" Last Words of the Executed for The Read's "Books I Missed" column at the New Republic.

Did I miss anything?

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Awards | Books for the News | Publicity
Posted by KAM at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1883, an interdisciplinary advocacy group promoting the study of literature and modern languages was founded at Johns Hopkins University. In its one-hundred and twenty-seven year run, the Modern Language Association has grown to include more than 30,000 members in over 100 countries, fostered several major publications and a serialized radio show, and survived the changing mores and face of the academy ("Watch for our posters and leaflets!"—from a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books in 1968 from Noam Chomsky, Frederick Crews, Florence Howe, and others, as to how the '68 MLA meeting in NYC might work to make the organization more responsive to society—part of a fascinating exchange available here).

One-hundred and twenty-seven years, though, is nothing to laugh at—and neither is the high regard with which the organization's annual awards for book-length scholarship are held. Notices went out via the interweb yesterday and we couldn't be more thrilled for several of our authors, who'll be further commended at the 2011 annual meeting this January in Los Angeles.

Laura Dassow Walls, author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, garnered the forty-first annual James Russell Lowell Prize for "an outstanding literary or linguistic study by a member of the academy." Walls traces von Humboldt's ideas for Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where von Humboldt first envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link discourses and nations in a global web of community. Check out the excerpt available at the book's UCP page here and have a look at what Science called "a heartfelt plea for environmental holism."

Jane Tylus will share the twenty-first annual Howard R. Marraro Prize for "outstanding book in the field of Italian Literature" for Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others, which Choice earlier proclaimed an "essential" volume.

Andrew Piper, whose Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination we just blogged about yesterday afternoon, received the seventeenth annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book for this work on the book's changing identity at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as acclaim from the New Republic for one of the Best Art Books of 2009.

And finally: Eric Slauter, author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution—in which he uncovers the hidden cultural histories upon which the document rests, in light of the artifice of the developing state—received Honorable Mention for the First Book award. Read an excerpt from the first chapter of The State as a Work of Art at the BookDaily site here.

Hearty congrats and warm weekend wishes to all of the winners!

Archived in Awards | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
Posted by KAM at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past Friday, one of New York City's most venerable cultural institutions, the 92nd Street Y (136 years strong and still kicking!) bestowed a unique honor upon one of the University of Chicago Press's most beloved authors. In all of the years that the 92Y has been creating and playing host to vibrant lectures, readings, conferences, community service opportunities, and city-wide programming, it had yet to endow and bestow an award named after a living figure—that is, until now. Please join us in celebrating the 92Y Vivian Gussin Paley Award for Early Childhood Education and its inaugural recipient, the "playful" visionary and early childhood education pioneer, Vivian Gussin Paley.

From the 92Y's commendation:

Vivian Gussin Paley examines children's stories and play, their logic and their thinking, searching for meaning in the social and moral landscapes of classroom life. A kindergarten teacher for 37 years, Mrs. Paley brings her storytelling/story acting and discussion techniques to children, teachers and parents throughout the world. In addition to her direct contributions to children and teachers, she is a MacArthur fellow and recipient of numerous awards, including: the Erikson Institute Award for Service to Children (1987); American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement (1998); the John Dewey Society's Outstanding Achievement Award (2000); and she was named Outstanding Educator in the Language Arts by the National Council of Teachers of English (2004).

The award itself celebrates Paley's inspirational contributions to the 92Y's Wonderplay initiative, which includes a conference attended by more than 900 educators each year, all of whom come together to consider Wonderplay and its core values, which seek to "awaken children's innate sense of wonder, promote self-discovery, build self-esteem, and inspire a love of learning."

We couldn't imagine a more deserving recipient than Paley. We're proud to publish five of her original books: Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four, Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner, Mollie Is Three: Growing Up in School, Boy on the Beach: Building Community through Play (check out an excerpt online at the book's UCP site), and A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (an excerpt aimed at first-grade education available here).

Feeling overwhelmed and not sure where to begin? Have a look at Patricia M. Cooper's The Classrooms All Young Children Need: Lessons in Teaching from Vivian Paley. Charting the change of attention paid to debates about the reduction of children's play time, the role of race in education, and the results of No Child Left Behind, this collection of essays embraces a holistic view of Paley's many books and articles. Here you'll find the evolution of Paley's thought, as well as the key characteristics of her teaching philosophy—everything from storytelling to superheroes.

In the meantime, here's a clip from our acclaimed advocate herself, delivering a talk at the 2008 Wonderplay conference:

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Awards | Books for the News | Education
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Earlier today, over at the New Yorker's Book Bench blog, Jenny Hendrix alerted us to the news that the late journalist Anna Politkovskaya has been awarded PEN English's first-ever award for literature in translation for her book, Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy. According to Hendrix, the book "is the story of a democracy in collapse, in which soldiers are slaves, judges are corrupt, and provincial oligarchs rule," and it paints a particularly brutal portrait of Vladimir Putin.

It was Russia's war in Chechnya that ignited Politkovskaya's fury with Putin, and her experiences there are documented in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Centered on stories of those caught in the crossfire of the Chechen conflict, A Small Corner of Hell recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it, from the guards who accept bribes from Chechens out after curfew to the United Nations. (You can read an excerpt from the book here.)

The conclusion of Hendrix's post is a moving testament to the legacy of this courageous journalist, who was assassinated in 2006:

There were never very many like her, and no doubt after her death there are fewer. But the case of Politkovskaya reminds us that as long as people remain to note what they see and hear, censorship won't work: even after voices such as Politkovskaya's are silenced, the written word remains to tell us how it was.

Archived in Awards
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There are your everyday, humdrum grants and awards and prizes, and then there are the MacArthur Foundation's "genius awards." They're special. They're an event. It's not just that they're valuable, or that the money comes with no strings attached. It's that they're shrouded in secrecy: recipients receive a phone call out of the blue informing them that they've won—in other words, that, unbeknownst to them, someone has been quietly paying attention to their work and thinks it worthy. Whether an honoree is famous or obscure—and this year's list includes both—surely there's a moment, holding the phone, when they feel like they've fallen into a fairy tale?

Today's MacArthur-sponsored fairy tale features a University of Chicago Press author as one of its characters. Shannon Lee Dawdy, an anthropologist here at the University of Chicago, was honored for her work

combining archaeological scholarship with historical preservation to reveal the dynamics of intellectual and social life in New Orleans from its establishment as a French colony to the present day.

Congratulations to all the MacArthur winners, and especially to Professor Dawdy—we can't wait to see what this newly minted MacArthur fellow comes up with next!

Archived in Awards
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The saying goes, don't judge a book by its cover. And that's good advice, except when jurying a publishing design prize. So we'll forgive AIGA, the professional association for design, and its annual list of the best book covers and designs. And, since it recognized the work of our outstanding designers at the Press, we'll even celebrate it.

Narrowed from more than 800 entries, the "AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers" is the definite list of the best book and book cover design produced in 2009. The University of Chicago Press is honored to have two of its books recognized this year. Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals and Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, both designed by Isaac Tobin (who's been racking up accolades recently), were named to the prestigious list.

Congratulations to Isaac and many thanks to AIGA for this honor!

Archived in Awards
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Congratulations to Alanna Mitchell, whose book Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth won the 2010 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Environmental Reporting. Awarded by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, the prize honors outstanding coverage of the environment and recognizes reporting that has the potential to bring about constructive change. Seasick is first the book to be named a Grantham Prize winner. Mitchell will receive $75,000.

Seasick is an engaging work that clearly and eloquently explains the specific dangers facing global marine ecosystems," said Dr. Sunshine Menezes of the Metcalf Institute. "Reading Alanna Mitchell convinces you that the ocean is at least as important as the atmosphere when we worry about climate change," added Phillip Meyer, chairman of the Grantham Prize Jury. Editorial Director of the Sciences at the University of Chicago Press Christie Henry said, "Alanna Mitchell possesses exceptional empathy for and understanding of the natural world, inclusive of our role within in. We're thrilled that she's being recognized by this prestigious award. In the wake of the Gulf oil spill, the ocean and its health are at the forefront of everyone's minds. Seasick could not be more timely."

The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey through a hidden realm of the planet and urges conservation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang. With Mitchell at the helm, readers submerge 3,000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava lamp–like dead zone covering 17,000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama. Ultimately, Seasick dives beneath the surface of the world's oceans to give readers a sense of how this watery realm can be managed and preserved, and with it life on earth.

Learn more about Seasick, its author, and the Grantham Prize and read an excerpt from Mitchell's previous book, Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots

Archived in Awards | Biology | Books for the News
Posted by at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Dedalus Foundation, founded by Robert Motherwell to promote understanding of modern art and modernism, recently announced the winner of the annual Robert Motherwell Book Award, Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense by R. Bruce Elder, published by the University of California Press.

The foundation also announced a special commendation award for the posthumously published book by Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity, which we released last year. In announcing the special commendation, the Dedalus Foundation said:

This study of the ‘monsters’ of the cathedral restored by Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century explores the complex position of these creatures between past and present. Narrating their conception and realization on the basis of impressive archival research, Camille proceeds to track their impact in shaping the modern imagination—not only in the arts but in science, politics, and popular culture as well—from Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet to Disney and the Internet. These are our monsters. The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is an expansive, interdisciplinary cultural analysis that questions defining assumptions of modern history and art history.

Michael Camille (1958–2002) was professor of art history at the University of Chicago and we were pleased to also publish his Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards
Posted by DB at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not long after Roger Ebert published Awake in the Dark with the Press in 2006, he lost the ability to speak. But anyone who has been keeping up with his career over the past several years knows that he hasn't been silent. Far from it, in fact. In addition to publishing two additional books with the Press (2008's Scorsese by Ebert and the forthcoming The Great Movies III), he continues to review films for the Chicago Sun-Times and has even found time to compile his favorite rice cooker recipes into a cookbook, due out this fall (sadly, not from the UCP). But perhaps his most notable achievement is his robust cyber presence; indeed, as Chris Jones posited in his moving profile of the critic in the February issue of Esquire, he needed to lose his speaking voice to find his voice again online. Jones writes, "More than five hundred thousand words of inner monologue have poured out of him, five hundred thousand words that probably wouldn't exist had he kept his other voice.… He spends several hours each night reclined in his chair, tending to his online oasis by lamplight. Out there, his voice is still his voice—not a reasonable facsimile of it, but his."

Between his always-entertaining Twitter feed and his ever-illuminating blog, Ebert is more prolific than ever, and closer to his readers, too. His second coming as a blogger was officially recognized this week when the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences awarded Ebert a Special Achievement Webby Award. In naming him the Webby Person of the Year, the IADAS noted:

In addition to his film criticism, which remains as eloquent as ever, [Ebert's] online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web, while at the same time shining a light on the most important issues facing journalism as it relates to the Internet itself. Ebert's insights— be they in film, online media, journalism or life—and his unparalleled level of engagement with followers and fans—has made the Internet a more thoughtful, engaging and self-aware environment.

As Ebert's voice flourishes online, it continues to resonate in more traditional forms, as well. Ebert's The Great Movies III, due out in October (the book jacket is making its online debut at the top right of this post), is the third collection of essays on the crème de la crème of the silver screen, each one a model of critical appreciation and a blend of love and analysis that will send readers back to the films with a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm—or maybe even lead to a first-time viewing. From The Godfather: Part II to Groundhog Day, from The Last Picture Show to Last Tango in Paris, the hundred pieces gathered here display a welcome balance between the familiar and the esoteric, spanning Hollywood blockbusters and hidden gems, independent works and foreign language films alike. Each essay draws on Ebert's vast knowledge of the cinema, its fascinating history, and its breadth of techniques, introducing newcomers to some of the most exceptional movies ever made, while revealing new insights to connoisseurs as well. The Great Movies III is sure to please his many fans and further enhance his reputation as America's most respected—and trusted—film critic.

Congratulations to Mr. Ebert on all of his success. We look forward to reading his writing—and hopefully publishing some more of it—for many, many years to come.

Archived in Awards | Books for the News
Posted by at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has recently announced its new 2010 members. The University of Chicago Press is pleased to note that five of our authors have made the list:

Eric Posner, professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School has published several books with the Press including his 2009 publication The Perils of Global Legalism and his 2001 Cost-Benefit Analysis: Economic, Philosophical, and Legal Perspectives with co-editor Matthew D. Adler. His newest book co-edited with his colleague at the U of C law School, Cass R. Sunstein, engages in a fascinating study of the notion of happiness—or "hedonics"— as it relates to law and public policy. Law and Happiness brings together the best and most influential thinkers in this burgeoning field to explore the question of what makes up happiness—and what factors can be demonstrated to increase or decrease it.

Marc Shell, professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard University, has dedicated much of his published work to the study of the intersection between economics and aesthetics, including his 1995 publication Art & Money—a frank, provocative, and entirely unconventional look at two worlds in tandem, focusing on what binds together and drives apart the seemingly disparate subjects of its title. Illustrated with over one hundred halftones and eight color plates, this stunning volume forces a rethinking of our old presumptions about where money ends and art begins.

Garrett Stewart, professor of English at the University of Iowa has published several works with the Press, his most recent being Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. In his book Stewart immerses himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, to demonstrate how Victorian novels hurtle forward in prose as violent as the brutal human existence they chronicle. Stewart uses his brilliant new method of narratography to trace the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By pinpointing where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a powerful case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels.

John N. Thompson, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has published several works with the Press dealing with reciprocal evolutionary changes in interacting species. In The Coevolutionary Process Thompson advances a new conceptual approach to the evolution of species interactions—the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution—to demonstrate how an integrated study of life histories, genetics, and the geographic structure of populations yields a broader understanding of coevolution. Picking up where his fist book leaves off, in his 2005 The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution Thompson synthesizes the state of a rapidly developing science that integrates approaches from evolutionary ecology, population genetics, phylogeography, systematics, evolutionary biochemistry and physiology, and molecular biology. Using models, data, and hypotheses to develop a complete conceptual framework, Thompson also draws on examples from a wide range of taxa and environments, illustrating the expanding breadth and depth of research in coevolutionary biology.

Last but not least Yale ecologist Günter P. Wagner published his Modularity in Development and Evolution, co-edited by Gerhard Schlosser, with the Press in 2004. Wagner's book offers the first sustained exploration of modules from developmental and evolutionary perspectives. Contributors discuss what modularity is, how it can be identified and modeled, how it originated and evolved, and its biological significance. Covering modules at levels ranging from genes to colonies, the book focuses on their roles not just in structures but also in processes such as gene regulation. Among many exciting findings, the contributors demonstrate how modules can highlight key constraints on evolutionary processes.

From the AAAS press release: "One of the nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies … the American Academy of Arts and Sciences undertakes studies of complex and emerging problems. Its membership of scholars and practitioners from many disciplines and professions gives it a unique capacity to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary, long-term policy research. Current projects focus on science and technology; global security; social policy and American institutions; the humanities and culture; and education."

More, including a full listing of new 2010 members on the AAAS website. Congratulations to all!

Archived in Awards
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Seth Lerer, author of Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter has won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Lerer's book—a comprehensive survey of children's literature, from Aesop's Fables to Harry Potter—offers a fascinating exploration of the various ways that tales like these have helped shape the Western literary imagination. According to the award press release:

"The book is also a kind of 'intellectual autobiography," touching on Lerer's own youthful passion for reading and his experience as a parent. "I thought about it from a personal view, watching how my son grew into a reader," he said.

Maria Tatar of Harvard University called the book "a breathtakingly powerful and complex history of children's literature that energizes rather than depletes."

"Lerer gives us the facts" Tatar said, "but he also weaves experiences and stories into an account that moves in registers ranging from the ecstatic to the elegiac. An ideal guide for students new to the field of children's literature as well as for scholars familiar with the territory."

For more details read the press release.

For more about the book read this excerpt.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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Bruce Smith, author of several books of poems including Songs for Two Voices, The Other Lover, and Mercy Seat, was recently awarded a 2010 Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award, which not only offers its recipients formal recognition by one of the foremost arts institutions in the country, but a cash prize as well, will be presented in New York in May at the Academy's annual Ceremonial.

Read the press release at the Academy of Arts and Letters website.

More about Smith's poetry from his bio at The Poetry Foundation website:

Influenced by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Smith's poetry moves like jazz, incorporating images and narratives into a startling, musically unified whole. In a 2007 interview, Smith explained his poetry's aspiration to song: "When the language works to seduce and … move us, when it works its blues on us, bounces us and trembles us, makes us swerve from our upright and rational propositions … we are thinking and listening at the same time or really listening and not thinking, like a good song does."

Follow the links for more on Smith's works from the University of Chicago Press:

Songs for Two Voices
The Other Lover
Mercy Seat

Archived in Awards | Literature
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In a ceremony that took place yesterday in the East Room of the White House President Barack Obama awarded University of Chicago historian and author William H. McNeill a National Humanities Medal. According to the NEH press release McNeill was awarded the prize in recognition of "his exceptional talent as a teacher and scholar… and as an author of more than twenty books, including The Rise of the West, which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history."

An article in today's Washington Post notes that alongside McNeill, a rather eclectic assortment of prominent figures in the arts, including singer Bob Dylan, actor and director Clint Eastwood, painter Frank Stella, and Nobel laureate and author Elie Wiesel, also received awards. The article in the Post continues:

Leaders in the arts and humanities are surveyed by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both federally funded agencies, and the final list is selected by the White House.

"These individuals and organizations show us how many ways art works every day," NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman said in a statement. "They represent the breadth and depth of American architecture, design, film, music, performance, theater and visual art."

To find out more about the award read the Washington Post article or navigate to the press release on the website of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more on McNiell's prolific oeuvre see this list of his publications with the Press.

Archived in Awards
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We are pleased to announce that the University of Chicago Press was the recipient of eleven PROSE awards at this year's Association of American Publishers/Professional and Scholarly Publishing conference in Washington, D.C., including their top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, for Catherine H. Zuckert's 2009 Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues.

The PROSE awards are the American Publisher Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence. According to the award website "the PROSE Awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. Judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals since 1976, the PROSE Awards are extraordinary for their breadth and depth."

In addition to the R.R. Hawkins Award Zuckert's Plato's Philosphers also received the top Award for Excellence in Humanities and the top award in the philosophy category. Other winners include:

Michael Camille's The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity— top prize in the Art & Art History.

Michael Forsberg's Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild—top award in the Biological & Life Sciences category.

Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism—top award in the Archeology & Anthropology category.

Lance Grande and Allison Augustyn's Gems and Gemstones: Timeless Natural Beauty of the Mineral World—top prize, Earth Sciences.

Dominic A. Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography—honorable mention for the best books in U.S. History & Biography/Autobiography.

Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi's Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works—honorable mention for the best books in Literature, Language & Linguistics.

David Gordon White's Sinister Yogis—honorable mention for the best books in Theology & Religious Studies.

Scott N. Brooks' Black Men Can’t Shoot—honorable mention for the best books in Sociology & Social Work.

See the complete list of award winners at www.proseawards.com.

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Last November we were pleased to note that Randall Couch was the recipient of Corneliu M Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation for his translation from the Spanish of Mad Women by Chilean Gabriela Mistral. The award—named after the translator of the work of one of Romania's leading poets—highlights the important, but unfortunately relatively scarce, contributions of literature in translation to the English speaking world. The award was announced by judges Elaine Feinstein and Stephen Romer on Thursday, 19 November 2009 in an event at London's Romanian cultural center, the Ratiu Foundation, which has recently posted some photographs of the event on their website. For more on the award navigate to http://www.romanianculturalcentre.org.uk/.

About Madwomen:

A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral's most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning.

From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting "madwomen" who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral's poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral's final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated "madwoman" than most have ever known.

Archived in Awards | Poetry
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We are pleased to announce that Terry Smith, author of What Is Contemporary Art? has won the 2010 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. The award, given each year by the College Art Association, is considered one of the most important in art criticism and will be presented to Smith on the evening of Wednesday, February 10 at the CAA's annual conference in Chicago.

Terry Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh. His many books include The Architecture of Aftermath, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Navigate to the CAA website for more information about the CAA awards and to view the complete list of previous Frank Jewett Mather Award winners.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards
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Earlier this morning the Chicago based MacArthur Foundation released a list of its 2009 fellowship recipients including author and legal scholar Elyn Saks. Saks is best known for her work in mental health policy advocacy, addressing legal issues related to those suffering from severe mental illness including involuntary commitment, competency to be executed, proxy consent, and the right to refuse treatment. She has published many books on these issues including Refusing Care: Forced Treatment and the Rights of the Mentally Ill—an insightful exploration of when, if ever, the mentally ill should be treated against their will—and, more recently, a memoir of her own battle with schizophrenia in The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.

The MacArthur Fellowships, also known as "genius grants," provide each recipient with $500,000 over five years to facilitate subsequent creative work. We are proud to have supported Saks in her past endeavors and look forward to her future contributions to the field of mental health advocacy as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

And as we congratulate her, we add her name to the growing list of Press authors who have received a MacArthur fellowship, including 2008 fellowship recipient and author of Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, Nancy G. Siraisi; Stuart Dybek, author of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods and a 2007 MacArthur Fellow; George Lewis, a 2002 fellow whose book A Power Stronger Than Itself we published in 2008; Dave Hickey, renown art critic and author of The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded; Danielle Allen, author of Talking to Strangers; and David Shulman, author of several UCP titles including his latest, Spring, Heat, Rains.

Archived in Awards | Law | Psychology
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On April 20, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences announced its new class of fellows and foreign honorary members. Among the 231 newest members of one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies are some very famous folks, including Dustin Hoffman, James Earl Jones, Dame Judi Dench, Bono, Colin Powell, and Emmylou Harris. But these marquee names are nothing compared to the real celebs on the list: the University of Chicago Press author brigade! Congratulations to Andrew Abbott, Danielle Allen, Alice Kaplan, T. J. Jackson Lears, Steven Shapin, Mary Ann Caws, Robert von Hallberg, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, and honorary member Simon Goldhill.

In other academy news, the Academy of Arts and Letters announced its annual awards on April 14. Among the many deserving honorees are a handful of University of Chicago Press authors. Phoenix Poets Michael Collier and Susan Stewart were awarded an Academy Award in Literature, given to encourage creative work. Sharon Cameron won a Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award in Literature in recognition of the quality of the prose in her recent book Impersonality: Seven Essays. And poet Peter Campion was awarded the Rome Fellowship in Literature, given to young writers of exceptional promise for a year's residence at the American Academy in Rome.

Three cheers for all our award winners!

Archived in Awards
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Since 1963, the Press has awarded the annual Gordon J. Laing Prize to the Chicago faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the Press's list. This year, at a ceremony held earlier this month, the prize honored Bernard Harcourt, the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Professor in Political Science, for his book Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in the Actuarial Age.

Harcourt's book challenges the growing use of actuarial methods—from random security checks at airports to the use of risk assessment in sentencing—to determine whom law enforcement officials target and punish. The widely perceived success of these methods, he argues, has begun to distort our very conception of just punishment and to obscure alternate visions of social order. You can listen to Harcourt discuss his arguments in greater detail during this podcast of a talk he gave for the Chicago's Best Ideas series at the University of Chicago Law School.

As the new Chicago Chronicle notes today, Harcourt said of the prize itself that it was "extremely rewarding—and also very humbling—to receive this recognition from the community of scholars who I admire the most. A community that values ideas so intensely and places critical thought above all else."

Harcourt's own contributions to this community have been great, and we are proud to have been part of two of them, including Against Prediction and his previous The Language of the Gun. Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell put it best: "Bernard Harcourt has never had an uninteresting thought, or made an argument that does not provoke or engage or delight or enlighten—or do all of those things simultaneously."

Archived in Awards | UCP News
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Earlier this month the Mellon Foundation named Tom Gunning—Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, editor of the press's Cinema and Modernity series, and a former member of the University's Board of Publications—as one of four recipients of their 2008 Distinguished Achievement Awards. According to an article in the Chicago Chronicle, "the three-year award, given annually to distinguished scholars in the humanities, provides as much as $1.5 million to the recipients and their institutions in order to deepen and extend humanistic research." The Chronicle notes that the Mellon funding will boost work on Gunning's current project titled "Poetics of the Moving Image" as well as "subsidize a wide variety of activities related to the project, including archival research, a visiting professorship, graduate student research, public conferences on such topics as 'Cinema and Magic' and 'The Optical Uncanny,' as well as performances." For more information read the article in the Chicago Chronicle or navigate to the press release on the Mellon Foundation website.

—Congratulations!

Archived in Awards | Film and Media
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The Lambda Literary Foundation has just announced the finalists for its annual Lambda Literary Awards—and we're pleased note that two Chicago books are in the running for best book in LGBT studies.

One contender, Amin Ghaziani's The Dividends of Dissent, chronicles the late twentieth century's four major gay and lesbian marches on Washington—demonstrations, he argues, that helped define what it means to be gay in the United States.

The other, Regina Kunzel's Criminal Intimacy, investigates a less public realm of American life. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries—along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners' rights activism; and the HIV epidemic—Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself.

Congratulations to both authors, who continue the nomination streak Mark Padilla's Caribbean Pleasure Industry started last year.

Archived in Awards
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We have a winner. The National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of their 2008 awards today and we are happy to congratulate Seth Lerer on his win in the criticism category for Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

A few days ago NBCC board member Carlin Romano described, in a posting to Critical Mass, the achievements of the book and the fairy-tale-like spell it cast on the committee:

Lerer brought to his subject both the critical acuity and unlimited openness it deserved. He insisted on placing a complex literature within the history of childhood, a story both contested and blessedly clear. He took into account the cavalcade of publishing history, without permitting it to trample the imaginative "transformations" wrought by the books. He understood that his terrain included not just books written for children, but books read by them, driving home the critical spine signaled by his subtitle.

Lerer accomplished much else in his fairy-tale feat of levitating a University of Chicago Press study, despite its small type, to a possible national prize from critics beleaguered by eye strain.… Members of the NBCC Board swallowed whole this splendid meditation on the literature that changes us most, and lived happily ever after.

Our warmest congratulations to Seth Lerer.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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Last Monday, the Los Angeles Times announced the 2008 nominees for the annual L. A. Times Book Prize. We were pleased to find Connie Voisine's Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream among the nominees in the poetry category while Martin J. S. Rudwick's Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform was also nominated in the science & technology category. There are nine competitive award categories in all—biography, current interest, fiction, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, young adult—each with five nominees. All awards will be presented in a ceremony on April 24, kicking off the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Click on over to the L.A. Times website to see the complete list of all 45 of this year's nominees, and congrats to our authors!

Also, a tip of the hat to Biblical Scholar Robert Alter, author of 22 acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism and contemporary Hebrew (many of which have been published by the Harvard University Press) and the 2008 winner of the Book Prize's Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.

Archived in Awards
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We are bemused to note that our book Baboon Metaphysics is shortlisted for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, an annual competition conducted by The Bookseller in the UK. The Diagram Prize, perhaps the least-coveted award in the publishing industry, began at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978 when it was won by the memorable Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. Close to thirty books have since been honored. The Press is usually named as the publisher of the 1988 winner, Versailles: The View From Sweden, though we only distributed that book for its publisher, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. (And, no, the book was not about high-powered telescopes.)

Previous winners of the Diagram Prize have tended toward the obscure (The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling), the suggestive (The Joy of Sex, the Pocket Edition), and the obscurely suggestive (Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality). The current competition is no exception, including shortlisted titles such as The Large Sieve and its Applications, Strip and Knit with Style, and Curbside Consultation of the Colon.

The winner of the Diagram Prize will be decided by a public vote on The Bookseller website. Please vote early and vote often.

Our honored title—as you can learn in an excerpt— is derived from a quote by Charles Darwin: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."

Archived in Awards | Biology
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This spring, the University of Chicago Press will proudly publish True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing by revered poet-critic Allen Grossman. In advance of this publication, we are very excited to announce that Professor Grossman has been awarded Yale University's Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.

A three-judge panel—composed of Frank Bidart, poet and winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, Peter Cole, poet and visiting professor at Yale University, and Susan Stewart, poet and professor of English at Princeton University (and Press author of the National Book Critics Circle award-winning Columbarium and, more recently, Red Rover, among many others)—described Grossman as "a profoundly original American poet whose work embraces the co-existence of comedy and tragedy, exploring the intersection of high poetic style and an often startling vernacular.… A distinguished teacher of poetics and literature, Grossman has influenced three generations of American writers. He has characterized the lyric poet as an individual who, 'by means of this art, seeks to speak with the utmost seriousness about the totality of what he experiences,' and Grossman himself has been refreshingly restless in that pursuit."

Reached for comment, Judith Grossman responded: "Allen feels deeply honored by this award. The Bollingen is the most prestigious prize for American poetry, and the list of honorees is extraordinary--it includes Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and virtually all the major poets of the modern era. The first Bollingen prize winner was Ezra Pound--a controversial choice. However, he was a mentor to James Laughlin, founder of New Directions Press, which has published many of Allen Grossman's books, so that there is a closing of the circle here."

The Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, established by Paul Mellon in 1949, is awarded biennially by the Yale University Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry. Previous winners include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, E. E. Cummings, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, and Jay Wright. The prize includes a cash award of $100,000.

Congratulations to Professor Grossman on a lifetime of poetic achievement!

Archived in Awards
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The National Book Critics Circle announced the nominees for its 2008 awards on Saturday. We were pleased that Seth Lerer's recent Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter is a finalist for this year's award in criticism. Offering insightful analyses of everything from Aesop's fables to Harry Potter, Lerer's book captures the rich and diverse history of children's literature in its full panorama, examining both the factors that have shaped children's literature, and how children's literature has, in turn, shaped us.

When we contacted Lerer about his nomination, he noted that since he dedicated the book to his mother, he would dedicate this honor to her as well: "She read to me, and took me to the library. There's a little vignette in the book about her taking me to the library; it's in the chapter on American libraries and American literature—the section on Johnny Tremaine."

To see the complete list of the NBCC nominees go to the NBCC Board of Directors blog. The winners will be announced on Thursday, March 12, 2009, at a ceremony held at the New School in New York.

You can read an excerpt from Children's Literature.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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The Nobel prize in economics (or to be exact, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), like most of the Nobels in the sciences, is typically won by an economist little known outside the academic world, or even outside the discipline. Paul Krugman's Nobel is different. He is that rare species, the public intellectual, the well-known academic, the economist with an audience.

The University of Chicago Press has published three books edited by Paul Krugman for the National Burea of Economic Research: Currency Crises, Empirical Studies of Strategic Trade Policy, and Trade with Japan: Has the Door Opened Wider?

These are books that will never be bestsellers—or anywhere near it—but contain the sort of research that creates prize-winning careers. Our warm congratulations to Paul Krugman.

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | Economics
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At a ceremony this Monday at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, John Dent-Young was awarded the Premio Valle Inclán by TLS editor Sir Peter Stothard for his recent English language translation of the works of Spanish poet Luis de Góngorra in Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora: A Bilingual Edition. In an article published yesterday acknowledging the award, the TLS's Adrian Tahourdin writes:

Góngora (1561–1627) is "considered by many to be Spain's greatest poet," according to Dent-Young, whose aim in this volume was "to rescue Góngora from his role as textbook example of the Baroque and give him a human voice," while suggesting that Velázquez's severe portrait of the poet (reproduced here) belies his true nature: "That bridge of yours, Manzanares, it's a laugh; / listen to what the people round here say: / it's a bridge that ought to span a mighty sea, / and you're not river enough to merit half" (from "The Bridge of Segovia"). Reviewing Dent-Young's work in the TLS of October 19, 2007, Chris Andrews wrote, "Góngora's verse affords a range of pleasures … but bringing those together requires patience, good will and philological help. John Dent-Young has provided the smoothest possible access to the poems.… The translations are inventive and unstuffy, sensitive and bold, a pleasure to read on their own."

Read the article on the TLS website, or find out more about the book.

Archived in Awards | Poetry
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Mark Feeney, arts writer for the Boston Globe and author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief, has won the Pulitzer prize in criticism for ten of his recent essays on visual culture. In an article posted to the Globe's website Monday afternoon Don Aucoin writes:

Feeney won the Pulitzer for 10 critical essays that suggest the fluency and brio of his writing style, and the range of interests on which he brings that style to bear.

He wrote of the "unheroic loneliness of everyday people'" reflected in the paintings of Edward Hopper, the "pure visual kapow" of aerial photos by Bradford Washburn and Frank Gohlke, the collision between art and celebrity in the work of photographer Annie Leibovitz, the artistic trajectory traveled by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and the sense of community in the work of photographer Charles (Teenie) Harris.

The essay on Hopper bears one of Feeney's trademarks, namely, the ability to see connections among disparate works, from high art to low. Feeney alludes to John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, and Alexis de Tocqueville, but then goes on to describe an artistic kinship between Hopper (or at least the world he created) and such figures as lyricist Lorenz Hart, Willy Loman from "Death of a Salesman,'" Elisha Cook Jr. in "The Maltese Falcon,'" Thelma Ritter in "Pickup on South Street,'" and even the Beach Boys.

The Globe has posted links to Feeney's Pulitzer nominated stories on their website.

Also be sure to check out Nixon at the Movies and experience for yourself Feeney's unparalleled ability to draw together seemingly incongruous subject matter into a fascinating critique of American arts and culture.

See a special web feature for the book.

Archived in Awards | Politics and Current Events
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Stuart Dybek, currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University is one of twenty four academics to be awarded a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. Dybek, born and raised in the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods, is the author of several books of poetry and three short story collections. We re-printed his first collection of stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a short piece this morning giving more details about the award:

MacArthur fellows were called out of the blue and told they each will receive a $500,000 no-strings-attached grant over five years.

Dybek, 65, said the grant "couldn't have come at a better time." By freeing him from having to take side jobs, the money will give Dybek time to finish three books.… A book of poems set in the Caribbean, a collection of short stories set in Chicago and other places, and a memoir.

We can't wait to see more work from one of Chicago's best homegrown authors!

Find out more about Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods on the press website.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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The American Academy of the Arts and Sciences has announced the selection of their 2007 fellows. We were pleased to note that eleven University of Chicago Press authors and editors were honored with this impressive distinction. A press release on the Academy's website quotes the organization's president Emilio Bizzi saying: "Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large." This year's recipients include:

Michael Christ, lead editor of Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations: Essays in Honor of Alberto P. Calderon

David M. Cutler, editor of The Changing Hospital Industry: Comparing Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Institutions and coeditor of Medical Care Output and Productivity.

John A. Goldsmith, coauthor of The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure and editor of The Last Phonological Rule: Reflections on Constraints and Derivations.

Robert Pogue Harrison, author of The Dominion of the Dead and Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.

Mary Power, coeditor of Food Webs at the Landscape Level.

N. Gregory Mankiw, editor of Monetary Policy.

Anna J. Schwartz, author of Money in Historical Perspective.

John L. Sullivan, coauthor of Political Tolerance and American Democracy.

Bruce Winstein, coeditor of Kaon Physics.

Wu Hung, author of Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, and The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting.

Robert Jeffrey Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago and author of Essential Results of Functional Analysis.

Archived in Awards
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Two University of Chicago Press authors were honored last Tuesday at the Society of Midland Author's annual awards ceremony. Roger Ebert's Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert received the top prize for adult non-fiction books, while Timothy J. Gilfoyle's Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark also weighed in as a finalist in the same category.

The awards contest is described on the Society's website as a "competition … open to authors and poets who reside in, were born in, or have strong ties to the twelve-state Midwestern Heartland." Ebert is an Illinois native while Gilfoyle is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. The winners will receive cash prizes, plaques, and of course, recognition from one of the Midwest's most distinguished literary societies.

Back in November we reprinted Ebert's interview with Robert Altman on this blog. Our website also features “A Millennium Park Trivia Quiz” based on Gilfoyle's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Film and Media
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At its award ceremony on Monday, April 30, the University of Chicago Press awarded the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize to W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, for his book What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images.

Awarded annually since 1963 by the Press, the Laing Prize is given to the Chicago faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the Press's list.

In What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell explores the idea that images are not just inert objects that convey meaning but animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. The book highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting.

Mitchell becomes only the third faculty member to win the Laing Prize twice; he also won the 1996 prize for Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.

What Do Pictures Want? was also the co-winner of the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Literature | UCP News
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According to a recent press release from the U.S. Postal Service, David Henkin, author of The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America will receive the first ever Rita Lloyd Moroney Award for scholarship on the history of the United States postal system. The press release states the award is "designed to encourage scholarship on the history of the United States postal system and to raise awareness about the significance of the postal system in American life." And certainly Henkin's nuanced history of the burgeoning nineteenth-century postal network does just that. Drawing on original letters and diaries from the period, as well as public discussions of the expanding postal system, Henkin tells the story of how the postal network transformed nineteenth-century American society, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications.

We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Awards | History
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The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has released its list of 2007 Fellows and we are pleased to find that ten University of Chicago Press authors have received fellowships. According to the Guggenheim website, "the Guggenheim Fellowship program helps to provide Fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible." Recipients include:

Shadi Bartsch, author of The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire, and co-editor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature

Michael Gorra, author of After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie

Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of The Last Fine Time

Margaretta M. Lovell, author of A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists, 1860-1915

Michael McCann, author of Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization

Mary Louise Roberts, author of Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927, and Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France

Laurie Shannon, author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, author of Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews

David Gordon White, author of Kiss of the Yogini: "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, and Myths of the Dog-Man

Our warm congratulations! View the complete list of 2007 Guggenheim fellows.

Archived in Awards
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Last year we published Anthony C. Yu's The Monkey and the Monk, his abridged translation of Hsi-yu Chi, a renowned classic of Chinese literature. The Monkey and the Monk chronicles the adventures of Xuanzang, a seventh-century monk, over the course of his sixteen-year journey in search of Buddhist scriptures. Rich with allegory, humor, fantasy, and satire, the book is an exciting foray into the Hsi-yu Chi and the ancient Chinese world.

But even at 528 pages The Monkey and the Monk is but a distillation of a larger project Yu began over thirty years ago to create a full English translation of this ancient Chinese epic.
Yu's Journey to the West is a four-volume translation of the complete Hsi-yu Chi—the only English translation available. We published the four volumes between 1977 and 1983. Now Yu will have the opportunity to revisit and revise his translation, thanks to a $55,000 award from the Mellon Foundation. An article in the University of Chicago's Chronicle details the award saying:

In 1984, Yu was awarded the Gordon J. Laing Prize from the University Press for his four-volume translation of The Journey to the West, the first complete version in English. The Mellon fellowship will support a thorough revision of that translation, featuring the conversion into the now standard Romanization of Chinese characters, a new scholarly introduction and updated annotations.

The Mellon support will enable Yu to reconcile the old full-length edition with the format, style and scholarly substance with the new abridgment.

Professor Yu's work has already contributed immensely to the West's understanding of ancient Chinese culture. With a Mellon grant to bolster his new revisions, Journey to the West will remain an unsurpassed achievement.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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On November 9, President Bush awarded Meryle Secrest the National Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House, one of ten writers and scholars so honored for 2006. Secrest is noted for her biographies of some of the seminal figures of modern art and music including architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and Joseph Duveen—the premier art dealer of the twentieth century. Secrest's biographies combine her comprehensive and detailed historical research with engaging narrative that reviews in publications like the Economist and New Republic have praised for expertly drawing out the connections between the lives and the art of her subjects. Bringing her readers into intimate contact with the rich history of the arts, Secrest's work is an invaluable contribution to the scholarly study of modern art.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | History
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An article in today's New York Times reports that historian John Hope Franklin has been awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity. The Times calls the million dollar award "the prize that Alfred Nobel forgot … specifically intended for areas that the Nobel Prizes do not cover like history, political science, sociology, and philosophy." Franklin, currently emeritus professor of history at Duke University, will split the prize with Yu Ying-shih, a professor of Chinese history at Princeton.

The New York Times writes that "Franklin is widely regarded as among the first scholars to explore fully the role of African Americans in the nation's history." Some of that scholarship was published by the University of Chicago Press. We published Racial Equality in America (1976), George Washington Williams: A Biography (1985), and Reconstruction after the Civil War, now in a third edition.

This is the third year that the Kluge Prize has been awarded by the Library of Congress. Franklin is the fourth UCP author to receive the prize; previous winners include Jaroslav Pelikan, Paul Ricoeur, and Leszek Kolakowski.

Archived in Awards | Black Studies | History
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The Press is pleased to announce that several of its authors have been named Academy of Arts and Sciences fellows for 2006. Fellowships recognize "individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large." The induction ceremony will take place on October 7 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Press authors receiving the honor include:

Ian Ayres, author of Optional Law and Pervasive Prejudice?

Alberto Alesina, editor of Politics and Economics in the Eighties

Charles Bernstein, author of several Press titles

Michael Dawson, author of Black Visions

Reid Hastie, co-author of Punitive Damages

Ha Jin, author of Between Silences

Michael Murrin, author of History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic

Anne L. Poulet, author of Jean-Antoine Houdon

William B. Provine, author of several Press titles

David H. Romer, co-editor of Reducing Inflation

James H. Stock, co-editor of Business Cycles, Indicators, and Forecasting

Rosmarie Waldrop, translator of The Book of Margins and The Book of Shares

View the complete list of 2006 fellows.

Archived in Awards
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We are pleased to note that several Press authors have been awarded Guggenheim fellowships for 2006. The Guggenheim Foundation supports "the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, or creed."

Recipients include:

Douglas Biow, author of Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy

Julia V. Douthwaite, author of The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment

David Garland, author of The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society and Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory

Arthur Goldhammer, translator of several Press titles

Mark Halliday, author of Jab and Selfwolf

Joseph Leo Koerner, author of The Reformation of the Image and The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art

Donald S. Lopez Jr., author and editor of several Press titles.

Deidre Shauna Lynch, author of The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning

Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights

John David Skrentny, author of Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America and The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America

Anne Winters, author of The Displaced of Capital and The Key to the City

View the complete list of 2006 Guggenheim fellows.

Archived in Awards
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Walter H. Calvin has received the 2006 Walter P. Kistler Book Award for his book A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change. The award, presented by the Foundation For the Future, recognizes authors of science-based books that contribute to society's understanding of the factors that may impact the long-term future of humanity.

Mankind has recently come to the shocking realization that our ancestors survived hundreds of abrupt and severe changes to Earth's climate. In A Brain for All Seaons, William H. Calvin takes readers around the globe and back in time, showing how such cycles of cool, crash, and burn provided the impetus for enormous increases in the intelligence and complexity of human beings—and warning us of human activities that could trigger similarly massive shifts in the planet's climate.

On April 6, at 7:00 p.m., the University of Washington will host an award ceremony for Calvin. He will be interviewed, participate in a Q&A session, and sign books. The event is free and open to the public.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Events | Awards | Biology | Books for the News
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Yesterday, nominees for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize were announced. We are happy to report that Gail Mazur's Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems is a nominee in the poetry category. Winners will be named on April 28.

Widely acclaimed for expanding the stylistic boundaries of both the narrative and meditative lyric, Gail Mazur's poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppo's First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazur's four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its searching poignancy and comic bravura. Mazur's explorations of "this fallen world, this loony world" are deeply moving acts of empathy by a singular moral sensibility—evident from the earliest poem included here, the much-anthologized "Baseball," a stunning bird's-eye view of human foibles and passions. Clear-eyed, full of paradoxical griefs and appetites, her poems brave the most urgent subjects—from the fraught luscious Eden of the ballpark, to the fragility of our closest human ties, to the implications for America in a world where power and war are cataclysmic for the strong as well as the weak.

Gail Mazur's books include Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems, They Can't Take That Away from Me, and The Common, all published by the University of Chicago Press

Read an excerpt from Zeppo's First Wife.

Read an excerpt from They Can't Take That Away From Me.

Read an excerpt from The Common.

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | Poetry
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History Today's March 2006 issue features a review of Matt Houlbrook's Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957, winner of its Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2006 award. Julian Jackson praised the book: "Superb…. This is scholarly history, but it is also the best kind of engaged history. Houlbrook clearly feels something was lost with the 'respectable' homosexuality of the 1950s although he is too good a historian to tell any black-and-white story. He sees the evolution he describes as 'simultaneously liberating and exclusionary.' If for some men the emergence of more private spaces after 1945 was 'unequivocally affirmative, offering them opportunities to socialize in a safe, respectable and semi-private place,' this process made things harder for those who wished—or were forced—to remain more visible. This is a book, finally, as much about London as about sexuality, demonstrating with empathy and subtlety both how sexuality was played out in the city and how it was shaped by it."

History Today editor Peter Furtado calls the book "[An] example of modern 'queer history' is an account of how gay people lived in London, which everyone, gay or straight, can relate to. Not written (as it might have been) as a tale of suffering, it is a lucid, sane and jargon-free account of how gay people negotiated space for themselves, physically, socially and emotionally, and draws on police records, memoirs, letters and newspaper exposés, as well as the first queer guidebook ever written. It deals with issues of policing, housing, geography, identity and politics faced by gay men in this period. It is also a book that will make anyone who reads it look at London and its public spaces through new eyes."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Awards | Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews
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Matt Houlbrook's Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 has received the Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2006 award. History Today Editor Peter Furtado described it as "not a story of persecution, but a lucid, sane and fascinating account of how gay people negotiated space for themselves within a hostile cultural environment, dealing with policing, housing, geography, identity and politics."

The current edition of the Times Higher Education Supplement features a review of Queer London by Matt Cook: "A ground-breaking work. While middle-class lives and writing have tended to compel the attention of most historians of homosexuality, Matt Houlbrook has looked more widely and found a rich seam of new evidence. It has allowed him to construct a complex, compelling account of interwar sexualities and to map a new, intimate geography of London.… There is a nostalgia here for a world lost. This brings a rare warmth to the book: Houlbrook has a genuine affection for the men and places he describes. Occasionally his spectacles feel just a little too rose (or lilac) tinted. He is right to suggest that some of our understandings of queer life have narrowed since the war, but I find it difficult to regret the passing of certain other interwar constraints. A small qualm, though, about a great book and a worthy winner."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Awards | Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews
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