New Books in Higher Education

Jeffrey joins the podcast to discuss the prevalence of English in the academic ecosystem and in research publishing. Jeffrey critiques the lackadaisical approach US institutions take towards Spanish language content and research and makes a strong argument to follow the Puerto-Rican model which sees greater opportunity, equality, and sophistication in multilingual academic research. About his book:Despite a pronounced shift away from Eurocentrism in Spanish and Hispanic studies departments in US universities, many implicit and explicit vestiges of coloniality remain firmly in place. While certain national and linguistic expressions are privileged, others are silenced with predictable racial and gendered results. Decolonizing American Spanish: Eurocentrism and the Limits of Foreignness in the Imperial Ecosystem (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022) challenges not only the hegemony of Spain and its colonial pedagogies, but also the characterization of Spanish as a foreign language in the United States. By foregrounding Latin American cultures and local varieties of Spanish and reconceptualizing the foreign as domestic, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera works to create new conceptual maps, revise inherited ones, and institutionalize marginalized and silenced voices and their stories. Considering the University of Puerto Rico as a point of context, this book brings attention to how translingual solidarity and education, a commitment to social transformation, and the engagement of student voices in their own languages can reinvent colonized education.Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is Professor at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alan Harvey, Director of Stanford University Press, sits with Avi to discuss why it is so challenging for scholars to write and publish books and to dispel myths around the profitability of all university publishers. Tune in to hear how Alan's sixth-month commitment turned into a lifetime pursuit of enabling authors to convey their research in a compelling manner.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does it feel to be groomed as the "solution" to a national Black male "problem"? This is the guiding paradox of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (U California Press, 2022), an in-depth examination of graduates of Morehouse College, the nation's only historically Black college for men. While Black male collegians are often culturally fetishized for "beating the odds," the image of Black male success that Morehouse assiduously promotes and celebrates is belied by many of the realities that challenge the students on this campus. Saida Grundy offers a unique insider perspective: a graduate of Spelman college and a former "Miss Morehouse," Grundy crafts an incisive feminist and sociological account informed by her personal insights and scholarly expertise.Respectable gathers the experiences of former students and others connected to Morehouse to illustrate the narrow, conservative vision of masculinity molded at a competitive Black institution. The thirty-two men interviewed unveil a culture that forges confining ideas of respectable Black manhood within a context of relentless peer competition and sexual violence, measured against unattainable archetypes of idealized racial leadership. Grundy underlines the high costs of making these men—the experiences of low-income students who navigate class issues at Morehouse, the widespread homophobia laced throughout the college's notions of Black male respectability, and the crushingly conformist expectations of a college that sees itself as making "good" Black men. As Morehouse's problems continue to pour out into national newsfeeds, this book contextualizes these issues not as a defect of Black masculinity, but as a critique of what happens when an institution services an imagination of what Black men should be, at the expense of more fully understanding the many ways these young people see themselves.Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can PhD programs prepare graduate students for future paths beyond academia? This episode explores: The positive effect on students when they are prepared to graduate with multiple career options. Why most jobs for graduating students will be located outside of academia. How students can build support networks outside of their own program. The importance of graduate student internships. Taking a broader view of what constitutes a “dissertation,” a “project,” and a career. Our guest is: Dr. Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli, who is the Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis.Our co-guest is: Anna Valcour (she/her) is currently a Ph. D. student in Musicology at Brandeis University while simultaneously earning her M.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She holds a M.M. in Voice from the University of North Texas, a B.M. in Vocal Performance, and a B.A. in History from Lawrence University. Her research interests include witchcraft and demonology in Lieder, cultic groups and music, vocal pedagogy, representation in opera and its staging, and voice-based analysis. She is currently the Project Lead for the Connected PhD and is also interning with the African and African American Studies for the creation of their newsletter and alumni collective. Last year, she researched insular plainchant as an assistant under Dr. Karen Desmond. In addition to her scholarly pursuits, Anna is a professional opera singer. She has been a Resident Artist for the Dallas Opera, Toledo Opera, Cedar Rapids Opera, Opera MODO, Ann Arbor Opera, and Main Street Opera.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Being Well in Academia: Ways to Feel Stronger, Safer and More Connected, by Petra Boynton The Field Guide to Grad School, by Jessica McCrory Calarco Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School, by Kimberly McKee and Denise Delgado, eds. Your PhD Survival Guide: Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year, by Katherine Firth. Liam Connell, and Peta Freestone Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom, by Katina Rogers Imagine PhD, created by the Graduate Career Consortium The Field Guide to Grad School podcast This podcast on protecting your wellbeing in graduate school This podcast on finding good alt-ac jobs The podcast on dealing with rejection so you can grow your career Welcome to the Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we are inspired and informed by today’s knowledge-producers, working inside and outside the academy. Missed any of our episodes? You’ll find more than 100 of the Academic Life podcast episodes archived and freely available to you on the New Books Network website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben Denne (Director of Publishing, Academic Books, Cambridge UP) joins Avi to discuss how Open Access quickly became a predominant form of academic publishing in the last decade, what issues OA raises for the publishing industry, how OA impacts book publishing and some of the creative solutions for alternative models, including CUP's novel "Flip it Open" program.We also discuss Ben's journey from writing children's books to presiding over one of the most important academic publishers in the world and the responsibility behind the position. Finally, stay tuned until the end for some interesting ideas regarding alternative publishing forms that break free of the 'book' and 'journal.'Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Schwartz joins Avi for a fascinating discussion about the relationship between Columbia University and the Press and how they bounced back after losing their biggest source of income. Eric also talks about the joint publishing program with Howard University and the work publishing still has to do to ensure that all scholars have the opportunity to publish with a leading university publisher.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s book is: A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2022), which is a guide for those who are teaching digital history for the first time, and for experienced instructors who want to reinvigorate their pedagogy. Offering design principles for approaching digital history that represent the possibilities that digital research and scholarship can take, Dr. Jennifer Guiliano outlines potential strategies and methods for building syllabi and curricula. Taking readers through the process of selecting data, identifying learning outcomes, and determining which tools students will use in the classroom, Guiliano outlines popular research methods including digital source criticism, text analysis, and visualization. She also discusses digital archives, exhibits, and collections as well as audiovisual and mixed-media narratives such as short documentaries, podcasts, and multimodal storytelling. Throughout, Guiliano illuminates how digital history can enhance understandings of not just what histories are told but how they are told and who has access to them.Our guest is: Dr. Jennifer Guiliano, who is a white academic living and working on the lands of the Myaamia/Miami, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Wea, and Shawnee peoples. She currently holds a position as Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty in both Native American and Indigenous Studies and American Studies at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is co-director with Trevor Muñoz of the Humanities Intensive Teaching + Learning Initiative (HILT). She is the author of Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America , and of A Primer for Teaching Digital History: 10 Design Principles . She is co-editor with Roopika Risam of Reviews in Digital Humanities, of DevDH.org with Simon Appleford, and of Digital Humanities Workshops with Laura Estill. She is also completing a co-authored work Getting Started in the Digital Humanities (Wiley & Sons).Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication, by Alex D. Ketchum Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time: Models for Higher Education Researchers, by Adriana J. Kezar et al Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross What is Digital History? by Hannu Salmi The Unessay as Native-Centered History and Pedagogy [an open journal article] This episode on teaching about race and racism in the college classroom This episode on From Equity Talk to Equity Walk with Dr. Tia Brown McNair This podcast the Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, talks about her book, Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in Debt, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Indentured Students examines the long history of student loans in the United States, including important turning points in the 1960s. Shermer argues that elected officials have preferred student loans as an answer to an important social problem, the perceived-need for college education, over more structural solutions. Shermer and Vinsel also talk about what this legacy of debt means today as well as what recent public discussions about student debt might portend for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s book is: We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States. The “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship, and has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of “deserving” immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers—themselves currently or formerly undocumented—counter the Dreamer narrative by grappling with the nuances of undocumented life in this country. Theorizing those excluded from the Dreamer category—academically struggling students, transgender activists, and queer undocumented parents—the contributors call for an expansive articulation of immigrant rights and justice that recognizes the full humanity of undocumented immigrants while granting full and unconditional rights.Our guest is: Dr. Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, an Associate Professor of Leadership Studies at University of San Francisco, who is an interdisciplinary scholar of immigration and education. Her academic, activist and community work focuses on the ways undocumented young people are changing the political and legislative terrain around “illegality” and belonging in this country. Her work lies at the intersection of education, immigration, and social movements. She is the co-author of Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World (2016, University of California Press) and co-editor of We Are Not DREAMers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States (2020, Duke University Press).Our co-guest is: Dr. Leisy J. Abrego, who is Professor in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the UCLA. She studies the intimate consequences of U.S. foreign and immigration policies for Central American migrants and Latinx families in the United States. She is the author Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders (Stanford University Press, 2014), and co-editor of We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States. Her scholarship analyzing legal consciousness, illegality, and legal violence has garnered numerous awards from the Latin American Studies Association and the American Sociological Association. She dedicates much of her time to supporting and advocating for refugees and immigrants by writing editorials and pro-bono expert declarations in asylum cases.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Negrón-Gonzales, G. (2017). Political possibilities: Lessons from the undocumented youth Movement for resistance to the Trump Administration. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. In press. Negrón-Gonzales, G. (2017). Constrained inclusion: Access and persistence among undocumented community college students in California’s Central Valley. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 16(2), 105-122. Negrón-Gonzales, G., Abrego, L., & Coll, K. (2016). Immigrant Latina/o youth and illegality: Challenging the politics of deservingness. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, 9(3). 7-10. Gonzales, R. G., Heredia, L. L. & Negrón-Gonzales, G. (2015). Untangling Plyler's legacy: Undocumented students, schools, and citizenship. Harvard Educational Review, 85(3), 318-341. This podcast on structural inequality in higher education Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Crewe talks about how translation became a key component of the Columbia University Press publishing program and how the press decides which books they want to translate. In addition, we go behind the scenes to understand the mechanics of a translation rights deal and how negotiations are conducted between academic publishers around the world. Finally, we cover the ever-changing business of academic book sales that can literally turn on its head overnight.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices