Happy University Press Week! We are thrilled to once again be featured the final run of the university press blog tour—this year, with a post from Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, co-editors of the second edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Designed as a print-digital hybrid publication, Keywords collects more than 90 essays—30 of which are new to this edition—from interdisciplinary scholars, each on a single term such as “America,” “culture,” “law,” and “religion.”
After reading the piece, head on over “from the square” to the other press blogs featured today! [Friday’s tour includes blog posts from Columbia University Press, University of Illinois Press, Island Press, University of Minnesota Press, and University of Nebraska Press. For a complete schedule, click here.]
We’re thrilled that the second edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies is finally here. In our roles as co-editors, we have had a great time working with such an exciting group of scholars across a wide array of interdisciplinary fields, including American studies and cultural studies. We hope that you will find their essays as stimulating and thought-provoking as we do.
As we note in our introduction to the second edition, we’ve been working with NYU Press on this “hybrid print-digital publication” even before any of us knew exactly what that phrase could or would mean. It’s been a learning experience for us as co-editors and for the Press. Now that it has arrived, we hope that it will be a rich and engaging learning opportunity for our readers.
The site is pretty straightforward. It includes the digital essays in full, the opening passages of the print essays, and resources for anyone interested in using the publication in courses. We’re particularly excited about the search and category functions, both of which allow users to map uses of a concept across the print, digital, and post-publication keyword essays. We invite you to play with these tools to see what they can offer!
As we mark and celebrate this launch, we also want to highlight one claim that we’ve made across both editions: a keywords project like this one is never done. It is a necessarily incomplete, participatory, and collaborative mapping of knowledge formations across multiple fields and from diverse positionalities. For this reason, we have built into the publication several ways that you can contribute to Keywords.
· You can propose to author a “post-publication essay,” a contribution that responds to or deviates from the essays included in or absent from the project. Contact us at [email protected].
· You can contribute to our archive of assignments that have engaged the publication and/or used the Keywords Collaboratory.
· We can post to the Keywords blog by describing pedagogical or other deployments of Keywords.
If you are interested in doing any of these things, please contact us. That’s all for now. Enjoy Keywords, in print and online, and please do let us know what use you make of it.
Bruce Burgett is Dean and Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, graduate faculty in the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle, and co-director of the UW graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship. Glenn Hendler is Associate Professor and Chair in the English Department at Fordham University, where he also teaches in the American Studies Program. Together, they are the co-editors of Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition (NYU Press, 2014).
