Illinois Press Book Blog

In the Summer 2008, the University of Illinois Press published a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education featuring discussions of an arts education curriculum project using the work of seventeenth-century Dutch painter, Rembrandt van Rijn, as an online teaching resource. Ralph A. Smith, founder and former editor of JAE and professor emeritus of cultural and educational policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, guest-edited the issue, and recently announced the formal launch of the NEH-supported Web site, Rembrandt and Collections of His Art in America.

Congratulations to Prof. Smith and his colleagues!

My friend and former colleague Will Powers died suddenly in August. He was the design and production manager par excellence at the Minnesota Historical Society Press. We’ve seen copious tributes to him since then, and a memorial is planned in the Twin Cities this coming Saturday. This remembrance of Will captures his inimitable self quite perfectly. Thanks, Pam.

Like many editors, I am a master in the art of no. Show me your prize and I’ll find a way to reject it or tear it apart and have it completely redone. But Will was a master in the Art of Yes. Yes, the budget is tight, but we can do this. Yes, that schedule is crunched, but we can do this. Yes, that text is a conundrum of words and maps and charts and translations, but we can do this. I got so jazzed bringing a unique problem Will’s way and watching him solve it: Hey Will, looks like we’ve got an Arabic publisher interested in our English edition of the Swedish Moberg titles. What say? And then I’d receive e-mails, typed so hard and fast I could hear his fingers hitting the keyboard like an old newsroom reporter on a Smith Corona. I’d have queries and solutions and links to New York Times articles and then maybe a day or two later a sample, borrowed from the local library.

David Wagoner’s book, A Map of the Night, has been named winner of the 2009 Washington State Book Award in Poetry.

Sponsored by the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library, the award recognizes books that exemplify the best writing in the state during a given year.

Congratulations, David.

Richard Hughes, author of the new book Christian America and the Kingdom of God, was quoted yesterday in a San Antonio Express-News column on the debate in Texas over how Christianity’s role in the founding of America should be portrayed in public school textbooks.

“It is absolutely right to suggest that Puritans who settled New England came here with a vision for a Christian commonwealth. It is absolutely wrong to suggest that America’s founders had that same vision. They simply didn’t.”

Many of the Founding Fathers were connected with churches and many were not, he said. Letters written by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, indicated he held the Christian church in utter contempt, the religion professor said. Jefferson viewed Jesus as a moral teacher but believed that churches had corrupted those teachings, Hughes said.

in one’s whiskey

When I’m in my whiskey, I don’t care what I say
’Cause me and my whiskey, we going to have our way.
—Barbecue Bob, “Me And My Whiskey,” 1929

Intoxicated; perhaps suggested by the genteel equivalent, in one’s cups. The above is one of the few instances of blues-era black slang for drunkenness.

From Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary by Stephen Calt.

What does your bookcase say about you? I have a few Billys but they hold CDs. Many of my books are stored in the garage waiting for that custom built shelf that never seems to get funded.

At Bully Bloggers, Ira Livingston, co-editor of the recent University of Illinois Press book Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, takes on Michael Berube’s recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay “What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies.”

Cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall is Berube’s primary foil in the essay—the one alongside whom all others fail to measure up– but Berube also cites approvingly the hard-hitting early work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson; the unflinchingly reflexive work on academic labor by Marc Bosquet, Cary Nelson, Andrew Ross, and Jeffrey Williams; and the work of cultural-studies emissaries into other disciplines; Berube mentions Mike Davis and Edward Soja in urban studies.

Notice anything about the scholars in this list?  Yep, they’re all men.

Webdesigner Depot features the Most Controversial Magazine Covers of All Time.

On Thursday, September 24, University of Illinois Press authors will appear in Boston, Chicago, and Jackson, Mississippi.

-P. Gabrielle Foreman, author of the book Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, will speak at the Museum of African American History in Boston, MA.
-Liesl Miller Orenic will discuss her new book On the Ground: Labor Struggle in the American Airline Industry at the Open University of the Left/Lincoln Park Library, Chicago, IL.
-David Beito and Linda Royster Beito will discuss their new book Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard and the Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power at Lemuria Books, Jackson, MS.

Inside Higher Ed reports that the search for a new director will continue at Northwestern University Press but a key journal will move online.

Beginning next year, the university announced, the press will make its primary journal, TriQuarterly, available only electronically.