The Chicago Blog

We are pleased to announce that the University of Chicago Press was the recipient of eleven PROSE awards at this year's Association of American Publishers/Professional and Scholarly Publishing conference in Washington, D.C., including their top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, for Catherine H. Zuckert's 2009 Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues.

The PROSE awards are the American Publisher Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence. According to the award website "the PROSE Awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. Judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals since 1976, the PROSE Awards are extraordinary for their breadth and depth."

In addition to the R.R. Hawkins Award Zuckert's Plato's Philosphers also received the top Award for Excellence in Humanities and the top award in the philosophy category. Other winners include:

Michael Camille's The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity— top prize in the Art & Art History.

Michael Forsberg's Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild—top award in the Biological & Life Sciences category.

Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism—top award in the Archeology & Anthropology category.

Lance Grande and Allison Augustyn's Gems and Gemstones: Timeless Natural Beauty of the Mineral World—top prize, Earth Sciences.

Dominic A. Pacyga's Chicago: A Biography—honorable mention for the best books in U.S. History & Biography/Autobiography.

Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi's Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works—honorable mention for the best books in Literature, Language & Linguistics.

David Gordon White's Sinister Yogis—honorable mention for the best books in Theology & Religious Studies.

Scott N. Brooks' Black Men Can’t Shoot—honorable mention for the best books in Sociology & Social Work.

See the complete list of award winners at www.proseawards.com.

   Archived in Awards
Posted by TXM at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a profile of one of the most consistently interesting academics today, Mark C. Taylor, chair of the religion department at Columbia University and a prolific author, having published tens of books and innumerable articles on topics from poststructuralism to the visual arts. Recently however Taylor's copious oeuvre has been slightly overshadowed by his controversial critique of tenure and the structure of the academy, originally published in the New York Times, and the basis of his forthcoming book from Knopf, Crisis on Campus.

In the Chronicle article, “The Provocations of Mark Taylor”, Eric Banks revisits the furor created by the article's radical recommendations for interdisciplinarity and the abolishing of "traditional disciplinary structures" but connects Taylor's critique to his other work, including his recent book from Columbia University Press, Field Notes From Elsewhere, his 2004 Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption, and his 2007 treatise on religion in contemporary culture After God.

Noting his concurrent efforts at reform in the religion department at Columbia, Banks article concludes:

"Whether his administration at Columbia, or for that matter his forthcoming Knopf title, will light a fire of reform, the experience is worth trying for Taylor. Consider it a continuing experiment born out of his own dissatisfaction: "I always say to my students, 'You don't desire satisfaction. Satisfaction is death. And there are a lot of living dead.'"

Also see all of Taylor's books published by the University of Chicago Press.

   Archived in Books for the News | Education | Religion
Posted by TXM at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Adrian Johns, author of Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates was recently interviewed by Serena Golden of Inside Higher Ed. In a series of questions that highlight several of the current hot-button issues in the IP debate including biotechnology patents and the Google books settlement, Golden engages Johns in a fascinating conversation that expands upon the historical account of intellectual property disputes found in Johns's book. A sample from the interview follows, or navigate to the Inside Higher Ed website for the complete article.

Q: Which of the current intellectual property debates do you see as most consequential, and why?

A: I see two conflicts as especially consequential: the patent struggles in the life sciences, and the copyright furor ignited by the Google Books initiative. In the life sciences, patenting has become a huge issue in several contexts. The pharmaceuticals industry has aroused fierce controversy in the developing world because of what are perceived as inequitable restrictions, agribusiness has generated similarly intense arguments, and biotechnology involves extending IP into the domain of life and its constituents. The stakes for the future of IP here are high because the human consequences are so evident, and the political interests very real. In the case of Google Books, the extraordinary promise of this vast enterprise may only be realizable via severe qualifications to the principles and practices by which publishing has operated for generations. The compromises that lie at the heart of copyright are in play once more. They may not seem so reasonable when the possibility exists of such a huge expansion of access to the world's books. Yet on the other hand, such access would give Google itself substantial control.

In these realms, challenges are looming to the two basic elements of our intellectual property system. I do not think it inconceivable that they could provoke legal and (perhaps) policy shifts as major as the establishment of copyright itself in the eighteenth century, and the development of modern patent systems in the nineteenth.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

   Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Law | Literature
Posted by TXM at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Offering some fascinating insights on one of the most contentious issues in publishing right now, a review of Adrian John's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates appeared in the January 21 edition of Abu Dhabi's The National. Reviewer Caleb Crain writes "by making words, music and images easy to copy and share, the internet may seem to have fractured trust between producers and consumers of culture around the world in a novel way. But in fact, producers and consumers have been in conflict for centuries." In his new book Johns offers a detailed account of this conflict, from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century, to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first.

In his review Crain briefly summarizes the history of intellectual property disputes detailed in Johns's book, and picks out a few details he finds most salient to current debates. From The National:

When literary property was abolished in Paris after 1789, cheaply printed, timely, derivative literature flushed everything else out of the marketplace—imagine the final triumph of the Huffington Post over the New York Times. Moralistic bullying failed when 19th-century American reprinters tried to agree not to pirate one another's piracies. Turning on consumers led to public relations disaster when the BBC hunted down illicit listeners in the 1920s, and again when Hollywood fought video tapes as home piracy in the 1980s. Unlike bullying and persecution, however, law has sometimes succeeded, especially when law has built on the conventions and courtesies that authors, publishers and readers have aspired to live up to among themselves. Yet some laws have proved so ambiguous that litigants have lost heart, gone bankrupt, or died before they could recover their rights.

In other words, Google's private negotiations with publishers and authors are an excellent start, but to ensure the future of copyright online, the people of the world, through their elected representatives, need to have a look for themselves. Intellectual property has been reconsidered and renegotiated with every new technology, and to hesitate to do so now, out of a timorous respect for earlier compromises, would be a failure of imagination.

Read the full review on The National website. The review's author Caleb Crain also posts opinion and criticism to his blog, Steamboats are Ruining Everything.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

   Archived in History | Law | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a link to one of the more interesting blogs we've stumbled across lately. Rationally Speaking, a blog managed by Massimo Pigliucci, CUNY philosopher and author of Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology, as well as the forthcoming Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, is a spin off Pigliucci's work on the philosophy of science with a focus on debunking virtually everything from Google, to the idea of American democracy itself. Recently, they've started up a new podcast, with the inaugural episode titled "Can history be a science?" and a special Valentines' day episode on the science and philosophy of love right around the corner. Listen and read at http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/.

   Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy
Posted by TXM at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For most of the last half century, the city of Chicago has been ruled by a man named Daley: first, from 1955 to his death in 1977, Richard J. Daley, and currently Richard M. Daley, who has reigned since 1989. With a collective 42 years of mayorship between them, father and son have created what some would call a Daley dynasty in the city of big shoulders.

Historian and city biographer Dominic Pacyga (his most recent book, Chicago: A Biography was published in October) recently presented a talk called "The Daleys of Chicago: A Study in Political Power" at the Chicago History Museum. C-SPAN was there, and the video of Pacyga's seminar can be found here.

If Pacyga's discussion of city politics leaves you wanting more about the city on the make, make sure to check out Chicago. Pacyga traces the city's storied past, from the explorations of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 to the new wave of urban pioneers today. The city's great industrialists, reformers, and politicians—and, indeed, the many not-so-great and downright notorious—animate this book, from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama. But what distinguishes this book from the many others on the subject is its author's uncommon ability to illuminate the lives of Chicago’s ordinary people. Born and raised in Back of the Yards on Chicago's southwest side, Pacyga spent his college years working at the Union Stock Yards. Chicago, therefore, gives voice to the city's steelyard workers and kill floor operators, mapping the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns. And their stories come alive through an extensive selection of evocative illustrations culled from major institutional archives, local historical societies, and the author's personal collection.

Filled with the city's one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.

   Archived in Books for the News
Posted by SXH at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the next 24 hours only the University of Chicago Press is pleased to offer the e-edition of Adrian John's brand new book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates as a free download from our website.

About the book&mdash: "[Johns] traces the tensions between authorized and unauthorized producers and distributors of books, music, and other intellectual property in British and American culture from the 17th century to the present. … The shifting theoretical arguments about copyright and authorial property are presented in a cogent and accessible manner. Johns' research stands as an important reminder that today's intellectual property crises are not unprecedented, and offers a survey of potential approaches to a solution." —Publishers Weekly

Check back tomorrow for Johns' previous work, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, (click the link for more about the book), and at the beginning of every month for more free e-books from the University of Chicago Press. Or to browse all our currently available e-books, see our complete list of e-books by subject.

E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books from the University of Chicago Press.

   Archived in History | Law | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)