Every year, the University of Illinois Press hires a graduate student from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Department of English to spend the spring semester working at the Press and learning about publishing. Interns gain hands-on experience through concentrated residencies in each of four departments at the Press: acquisitions; editorial, design, and production; marketing; and journals.
Below is a reflection from our most recent intern, Sloane Ebbay, on his experience as the 2025 ‘Round-the-Press Intern and his favorite books and journals published by the Press. From all of us at the Press, thank you for your great work this semester, Sloane!
Hi, my name is Sloane Ebbay, and I interned at the University of Illinois Press as the ‘Round-the-Press intern for the Spring 2025 semester. I’m a graduate student in the English department at UIUC and my research thinks about Philippine cinema, cinematic time, melodrama and the perception of duration at the turn-of-the-millennia. I particularly enjoy the motion pictures of Lav Diaz and Tsai Ming-Liang, and am currently thinking about how melodrama might change when subject to various techniques of slowness. In this post, I want to talk about my experiences as the Round-the-Press intern and then move on to talk about some book series, individual titles, and journals that captured my interest.
The Round-the-Press internship was thoroughly a blast, and I would recommend it to anyone with even just a small curiosity about how books and journals are made. Each department gave me a warm welcome, starting with acquisitions and then working with EDP (Editorial, Design, and Production), Marketing and finally with Journals. I enjoyed each phase and particularly enjoyed working with EDP where I got to learn about page setting, design and work with InDesign. As a fun project to get more experience with InDesign I tried to turn my master’s thesis into the book format. I had a blast getting to see what it might look like as a book, browsing through libraries of fonts and designing a cover for it.
As for book series, I really enjoyed coming to find out that the Contemporary Film Directors series was a part of the UI Press’s catalog. I have looked at Kelly Reichardt in the past to get a different take from the slow cinema writing on her that I am more familiar with, and look forward to spending time reading more from this series.
A book title that sparked my interest was Kim Hong Nguyen’s Mean Girl Feminism, which I will take some time off of my current research to read. The production of it is something that stands out from the captivating title to the hot pink cover design. The subjects of gaslighting, gatekeeping and girlbossing as a performance of subjectivity are even more fascinating. I think anyone seeking to understand the strange subjectivities that have emerged out of our weird internet age should give this a read.
I also came across many interesting titles as I completed my time at the press with Journals. It probably is not a surprise that I spent a lot of time looking at Journal of Film and Video and Music and the Moving Image. In that journal I came across a handful of titles that brushed up against things that I’m interested in like cinematic time, waiting and silence –all things that I have developed an interest in as I continue studying cinema and slowness. I haven’t yet had time to fully read the articles but I am particularly excited to look at “Music, Form and Crooked Time” in Music and the Moving Image (Vol. 14, Iss. 1, Spring 2021), “Middle of Nowhere (2012): Waiting Studies, Cinema, Temporal Experience” in the Journal of Film and Video (Vol. 76, Iss. 3, Fall 2024), and “Audiovisual Silence: A Lever for Narrative Change and Transition” again in Journal of Film and Video (Vol. 75, Iss.3, Fall 2023).
Overall, my experience as the Round-the-Press intern was a positive one. It was a wonderful time learning about how a book moves from its early manuscript stages to completion. I feel like I got a much deeper understanding of each department at the press. I also can’t stress enough how kind everyone at the press was.