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Lever Press Fall 2022
In this issue...
- Oversight Committee Chair's Update
- Call for OC Member Nominations
- Meet the New Marketing Manager
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New Lever Press Titles
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Announcing the Release of La Princesse de Clèves
- Announcements
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OPEN ACCESS • PEER REVIEWED • BORN DIGITAL
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Oversight Committee Chair's Update | |
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Thank you for continuing to be a member of Lever Press! Thanks to your support Lever continues to give libraries a leadership role in the open access landscape and to publish titles that embrace interdisciplinarity and the liberal arts. Our most recent titles are detailed below. We’re especially excited about the publication of La Princesse de Clèves, an innovative project that the Lever team has been working on for some time which has expanded the possibilities of the Fulcrum platform. We hope you’ll check it out, along with other new books in the Lever catalog.
We’re pleased to welcome the four libraries that have joined the Lever initiative in the past few months:
- Knox College
- Occidental College
- University of Northern Colorado
- University of Rhode Island
We’re also pleased to welcome Curtis Brundy, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Communications and Collections at Iowa State University, to the Lever Oversight Committee. Curtis will serve on the OC through December of 2024. The complete roster of Oversight Committee members can be found on the Lever website. If you are interested in serving on the Oversight Committee, please see the call for nominations below.
If you have any input or questions about Lever, please feel free to reach out to me (ahousto3@swarthmore.edu). I look forward to hearing from you!
Anne Houston, Director of Libraries, Swarthmore College
Chair of the Lever Oversight Committee, 2022
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Oversight Committee Member Call for Nominations | |
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Two members of the Oversight Committee, Marta Brunner (Skidmore College) and Martin Garnar (Amherst College), are rotating off at the end of this calendar year. Thus, we are calling for nominations and self-nominations from member representatives for these positions in anticipation of an election in November. We would like to extend a special invitation for nominations from institutions that recently joined Lever Press.
The Oversight Committee meets monthly for an hour via zoom, and participates (virtually or in person, depending on circumstances) in a yearly retreat with the Editorial Board as well as an annual Lever members meeting. If you are your institution's Lever Press voting representative and interested in running, please contact Lever's program manager Terri Geitgey (tgeitgey@leverpress.org). The three-year term begins in January of 2023. If you want to learn more before you commit, please feel free to reach out to any of the current board members who are listed at https://www.leverpress.org/about#oversight. We hope you will consider nominating yourself. Oversight Committee service is an important opportunity for member representatives to shape the future of Lever Press.
Nominations are due Monday, November 14. If you wish to nominate a colleague, please let Andrew Ashton (anashton@vassar.edu) know and he will reach out to that individual.
Thank you for considering this request,
The Lever Press Nominating Committee (Andrew Ashton, Vassar College, Frances Maloy, Union College and Brad Schaffner, Carleton College)
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Meet the New Marketing Manager | |
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Jamie Jones (she/her) joined Lever Press and Michigan Publishing in April 2022. She has worked in university press publishing for over a decade and is excited to use her experience in scholarly books marketing to promote both forthcoming and backlist Lever Press titles.
Jamie has been working on implementing marketing plans and promotional schedules for books and increasing our communication with authors. Since Jamie has started promoting Lever Press titles, we have seen an increase in review copy requests and are starting to nominate projects for book prizes and digital humanities awards.
Her goal is to begin promoting Lever Press at exhibits and conferences, build the reputation of Lever Press within the scholarly publishing community, and to increase and track usage of OA editions.
If you have any questions for Jamie, feel free to reach out to her at jojamie@umich.edu.
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2022 has seen many changes at Lever Press, including my arrival as acquiring editor and the onboarding of our new marketing manager, Jamie Jones. We’ve also been devoted to continuity of process, moving excellent open access projects toward the production pipeline while streamlining our services to offer a more stable approach to publication that allows us to accurately predict and stick to publication dates. All of this means that 2023 will be a banner year for Lever Press, with 7 books slated for publication between January and August, and two more books likely to be added to the 2023 publication schedule in the coming months. The new catalog compiled by our marketing manager gives a taste of the books coming out, but I wanted to highlight below a few that truly embody the spirit and mission of Lever Press.
Sean Guynes, acquiring editor
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In January 2023 we'll publish Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live, a groundbreaking trade book by Eric Chown and Fernando Nascimento (Bowdoin College, a Lever Press funding institution). Chown and Nascimento, one a computer scientist and the other a philosopher, offer a systematic reconsideration of the ways in which digital technologies impact our lives both individually and collectively. This book is perfect for a general public interested in how digital technology and apps, from cloud computing to TikTok, harness the power of language and meaning to change society, and will make a useful tool for interdisciplinary courses across colleges. | |
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Then, in February 2023, Masood Ashram Raja's Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred gives powerful insight into how readers from outside of one culture can learn, through new reading practices, to interpret the worldview of their Others. Focusing particularly on literature by Muslim authors who publish largely for cosmopolitan Western audiences, Raja encourages non-Muslim Western readers to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning making processes of the Islamic world while at the same time encouraging Muslim readers to read representations of Islam and the Islamic world with a more expansive understanding of the world. Democratic Criticism will be a powerful addition to literary studies and individual chapters will make for excellent readings in literature classrooms alongside the texts they critique.
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The new year continues into early spring with March 2023 seeing the launch of the second volume in our Open Access Musicology series. Volume 2 includes six contributions from undergraduates and scholars alike, who write on music from the 16th century to the present and music from throughout Europe, South America, and Asia. Throughout, the authors situate music in political, religious, racial, economic, and other cultural and disciplinary contexts, expanding what scholars generally mean when they refer to “musicology” and “music,” always with an eye toward relevance and accessibility. The series is a demonstration of the incredible value that collaborative pedagogy in liberal arts education brings to scholars and students alike.
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Announcing the Release of La Princesse de Clèves
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Lever Press announces the publication of a newly translated, digitally rich, bilingual pedagogical edition of the classic 17th-century French novel: La Princesse de Clèves by Lafayette: A New Translation and Bilingual Pedagogical Edition for the Digital Age, edited by Hélène E. Bilis, Jean-Vincent Blanchard, David Harrison, and Hélène Visentin.
La Princesse de Clèves, written in 1678 by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, is frequently considered the first modern French novel and a key text in the history of European literature. The artistic complexity of La Princesse de Clèves calls for making the work available to English-speakers and undergraduates in a new edition: one that immerses readers in the cultural and intellectual worlds of Lafayette, with direct access to period documents, portraits, maps, dictionary definitions, and journalistic debates; one that outlines contemporary polemics and scholarship with video interviews of Lafayette scholars; one that invites new readers and fresh discoveries by using the analytical tools of the Digital Humanities.
This new edition and translation foregrounds French literary and linguistic content to encourage students’ active engagement in their reading. This approach helps foster an awareness of how technology actively shapes the ways in which we think through and in a language. Interactive paragraphs and lexical definitions encourage readers to move with ease between the French and English texts. Accompanying didactic essays empower readers to reflect on Lafayette’s vocabulary and on practices of translation more broadly. The edition also offers pedagogical dossiers and a variety of innovative resources influenced by the Digital Humanities, such as linked historical images and maps, word mining exercises, spatial mapping and social network analyses. In addition to overviews of Lafayette’s milieu and adaptations of La Princesse de Clèves, this edition also includes excerpts from the rarely-translated letters published in an early modern gazette in response to the novel. These features enable a new generation of readers to grasp the seventeenth-century public’s reaction to Lafayette’s work. They also constitute a wide range of resources for teaching and exploring La Princesse de Clèves in twenty-first century courses.
Read it for free on the Fulcrum e-reader: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12629286
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New Lever Press Catalog!
Our newest digital catalog, containing new titles from 2022 and a preview of what's to come in 2023, is now live! View the PDF here:
https://www.leverpress.org/news/2022-10-14-lever-press-releases-its-new-catalog/
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Visit the Michigan Publishing Booth at Charleston
If you're attending the annual Charleston Conference this year, please stop by the Michigan Publishing booth (table #25, Gaillard Center Grand Ballroom) to say "hi". Jason Colman, Director of Michigan Publishing Services, will be happy to provide a demo of the Lever Press multimedia project La Princesse de Clèves while you're there!
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Membership Benefits Reminder
We’d like to remind Lever Press pledging institutions that in addition to the opportunity for voting representatives to participate in Lever’s governance by serving on the Oversight Committee, other member benefits include the ability to request a complimentary print copy of any Lever Press titles for your library, and the ability to directly order additional print copies of Lever titles at a 50% discount off the retail price. Our current catalog of titles can be found here.
To take advantage of these benefits please email program manager Terri Geitgey (tgeitgey@leverpress.org) with your request for complimentary copies (include the list of titles along with a recipient name and delivery address) or for information on how to order additional copies at a discount, or both.
[Please note: due to the complex digital nature of the La Princesse de Clèves title, we’re unable to offer a corresponding print format.]
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