Academics are making a comeback—at least as finalists in the National Book Awards’ Nonfiction list. In 2012, there was nary a university-based scholar in that slot, although other categories had several.

Of the five finalists in Nonfiction announced on Wednesday, three have academic affiliations.

Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard University, is a finalist for Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Alfred A. Knopf).

Wendy Lower, up for Hitler’s Furies: German …

The University of North Carolina Press announced today a grant of $100,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to study the challenges and opportunities facing university presses as they expand their forays into electronic publishing.

The 12-month project, led by UNC press director, John Sherer, will begin July 1.

Michael Walzer, political theorist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., recently announced he would be retiring from his post as co-editor of Dissent. After 50 years with the quarterly (roughly 20 of them as co-editor), Walzer is stepping down to concentrate on other projects (including writing a book, editing two more volumes of The Jewish Political Tradition, and lecturing at Yale). “I just can’t keep up anymore,” he told The New Republic.

In Dissent…

Jessica Burstein is an associate professor of English at the University of Washington. She specializes in modern British and American literature and culture.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

I look at e-mail and the Guardian online, since it has a better sense of proportion than American papers. Then I look at The New York Times. I have a friend in New York who reads everything and sends me articles that I need, even before I know I need them.

Q: What newspapers and magazines d…

In May 1942, in the wake of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Gordon K. Hirabayashi had no doubt that the United States government was acting unconstitutionally in imposing curfews, loyalty oaths, and mass removal and internment on Japanese-Americans living along the West Coast.

So Hirabayashi, then a University of Washington student, defied two orders—one imposing curfews, another requiring anyone officials deemed a possible enemy to fill out a “loyalty questionnaire.” For that he was arrested…

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is vice provost for global initiatives and chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (Random House).

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

The New York Times. In print. I’m boring.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print versus online versus mobile/tablet?

I get The Econo…

Academics were among the winners of Pulitzer Prizes in History, Letters, and Music announced this afternoon.

In History, Fredrik Logevall won for Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House), cited as “a balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road to full-blown war.” Logevall is a professor of international studies and of history at Cornell University, wher…

Adam Grant is a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant is the author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (Viking). He is a former advertising director, Junior Olympic springboard diver, and professional magician.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

Without fail, when I wake up, I immediately gravitate to the most mesmerizing, so-enthralling-that-I-can’t-put-it-down genre of our era: e-mail. Luckily, on most mornings,…

A generous new writers’ award has made its debut. Today, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University announced the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes, a global award for writers endowed by a gift from the late novelist Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell. Windham, who died in 2010, left his papers to the Beinecke.

Nine writers, ages 33 to 87, none of whom knew they were nominated, won $150,000 prizes for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfictio…

Marianne Boruch

Claremont Graduate University has announced that Marianne Boruch has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for 2013. The prize, $100,000, is given annually to a mid-career poet and is one of the largest monetary awards for poetry in the United States. Boruch, who teaches at Purdue University and Warren Wilson College, won for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press).

In addition, the poet Heidy Steidlmayer will receive $10,000 as winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her coll…