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The Review

What topic areas are overpublished?

June 4, 2017

I don’t think we need another book defending the liberal arts. They are sermons to the converted. —Greg Britton

•

We have enough Big History to last several lifetimes. —Elizabeth Branch Dyson

•

I don’t know, but diminishing sales will tell us soon and then we’ll all move to overpublishing in a different area.—Ian Malcolm

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I don’t think we need another book defending the liberal arts. They are sermons to the converted. —Greg Britton

•

We have enough Big History to last several lifetimes. —Elizabeth Branch Dyson

•

I don’t know, but diminishing sales will tell us soon and then we’ll all move to overpublishing in a different area.—Ian Malcolm

•

Review - Publishing Package
The Future of the University Press
Publishers, press directors, editors, scholars, and other insiders share their views on the state and future of academic publishing.
  • Our Contributors
  • What is the most common misunderstanding that scholars have about university presses?
  • Do we need more university presses? Fewer?
  • Scholarly prose gets a bad rap. Is it deserved?
  • How will university presses look 20 years from now?
  • How should the university press role in hiring and promotion change?
  • What book do you wish someone would write?
  • What is the biggest challenge in university-press publishing?
  • Acquisitions editors are overwhelmingly white. How does this affect what gets published?

Self-reflexive studies of the digital humanities. I want to see examples of how digital scholarship has transformed our understanding of particular issues in the humanities rather than yet another effort to define whether digital humanities is a field or not. —Charles Watkinson

•

Just when you think a question has been answered from every angle, a scholar and/or creative thinker can reopen the question and jump-start the conversation in a different direction. —Brian Halley

•

Humanities in various combinations and permutations. The better question bears on which topics are underpublished: the professions, science, and the connections between the humanities and the professions. —Peter J. Dougherty

•

Everyone seems to have written a memoir, and fewer of them should be published. —John Byram

•

Hot topics will always eventually be overpublished, but that problem self-corrects quickly as new areas of interest emerge. —Dean J. Smith

•

I’ve seen enough regional histories about “first settlers” or “pioneers” that don’t acknowledge the existence, perspectives, and displacement of indigenous communities. —Ranjit Arab

•

There is no quota for good scholarship on a subject. The notion of overpublishing is akin to saying that a sunrise is too beautiful or a glass of wine too good. —Carey Newman

A version of this article appeared in the June 9, 2017, issue.
Read other items in The Future of the University Press.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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