Five University Presses, One New Literary Studies Line

By Ron Hogan on February 19, 2008 3:00 PM

At the very tail end of 2007, I mentioned a new publishing plan that had five university presses coming together like Voltron. I wanted to learn more about the American Literatures Initiative, so last month I met with Steve Maikowski, the director of NYU Press and the source of the ALI proposal. I’ve finally had a chance to sit down with those notes…

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has long been a supporter of academic publishing, Maikowski noted, but when the foundation sent out a letter last year requesting proposals for collaborative ventures “supporting underserved areas in humanistic scholarship,” many in the academic press community weren’t sure what to make of it. “It was asking us to do and think in different kinds of ways than we were accustomed,” he said, and yet the actual call was somewhat vague and ambiguous in its invocation of collaboration and sustainability. And, he felt, the three-year timeline Mellon had set was too short to prove a publishing program’s effectiveness. (That complaint, he said, was echoed by several other proposals that survived the foundation’s first round of review, resulting in the eventual expansion of the grant to five years.) Nevertheless, he started figuring out what sort of publishing plan he could come up with.

“The day before the deadline, I was still working on the first draft and finding out who our partners would be,” Maikowski said. “I wanted to find presses that were like us in some ways: roughly in the same location, and also publishing 50-100 books a year. I wanted to find people who were already publishing literary history and criticism and would like to do more if they could afford it.” The four houses that signed on with him were Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. (Similar ventures among other unviersity presses, focusing on Slavic and South Asian studies, received smaller five-year grants, with a one-year grant awarded to an ethnomusicology project; Maikowski says that nobody else came to NYU with an invitation to join a competing proposal.)

For Maikowski, capitalizing on the strengths and interests of NYU’s scholars had to be a crucial part of his plan, and that’s what led him to the university’s English department, especially its recent growth in interdisciplinary studies. Because of implicit interest on the Mellon’s part in encouraging new scholarship, the Initiative will be dedicated exclusively to debut works by emerging academics. The collaboration with the other presses consists primarily of a shared, centralized production team that will start by copyediting the manuscripts and prepare the books to be handed off to the printer.

“I hope we’ll get a few good trade books out of this,” he said, but mostly the five presses will be dealing with monographs. “Each press will probably sign a couple books in this first quarter,” he added, “and it’s possible that they might have books on display at the Modern Language Association conference at the end of the year, if the books were signed and completed by the end of March.” But Maikowski is setting his sights on a goal further down the road, to keep the Initiative running smoothly when the Mellon’s $1.37 million grant expires at the end of year five, so that it will become financially viable on its own afterwards. “What the collaboration will help us do is create new sustainability models that may be scalable,” he says—an important consideration when you factor in the pressure many university presses are feeling to achieve greater financial performance. Other university presses will almost certainly be watching the ALI and the other collaborative projects closely to see if the results are worth imitating with new sets of partners, concentrating on new fields of knowledge.