Last spring, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funds a variety of programs in higher education and scholarship, invited university presses to submit joint proposals to cooperate on their publishing programs in areas of scholarship where declining sales were endangering junior faculty’s opportunity to publish first and second books. These areas included subjects such as literary criticism, history, area studies, anthropology and others.

Of almost 30 proposals received, the foundation funded four. Temple University Press was the only press participating in two of the winning proposals.

“I think that’s a reflection not only of the need for funding in these two areas, but also of TUP’s reputation for publishing first-rate scholarship,” said Alex Holzman, director of the Temple University Press.

One of the grants is called the American Literatures Initiative. First suggested by New York University Press director Steve Maikowski, it brings Temple into partnership with presses from Fordham and Rutgers universities and the University of Virginia as well.

Totaling $1.37 million, the grant will allow presses to pool production efforts and many marketing tasks and to explore ways to sustain the partnership after the grant expires. Temple’s books in the initiative will focus on literary studies in Asian American, African American and gender studies.

Our primary goal is to disseminate scholarship,” Holzman said. “These authors may have extremely small audiences, but their research is tremendously valuable within the field.”

Temple’s other winning proposal dealt with ethnomusicology, which studies music within its cultural contexts. This idea originated with Temple, and the partners will be Indiana University Press and Kent State University Press. Besides furthering the continued publication of monographs, the project will explore the best way to disseminate audio and visual materials that supplement the text.

"Most audio/visual content has been on CDs in the back of books,” Holzman said, “but that is inherently inefficient because CDs are easily separated from books, and because no one knows whether CD players will be available in 10 or 20 years.”

The first phase of the ethnomusicology grant will study the possibility of creating a web site that could provide a permanent home for audio/visual materials; it will also survey ethnomusicologists and librarians to determine how such a site could best serve their needs.

Upon completion of this “feasibility” phase of the grant, the cooperating presses will apply for a four-year implementation grant.

Thanks to the foundation’s grants, Holzman is looking forward to expanding Temple’s role in these two important areas of scholarship.

“All of us at Temple University Press and all our partners at other presses are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their commitment to scholarship. And at Temple we’re also grateful to the university for its constant and continuing support of our efforts to disseminate the highest-quality scholarship to a global audience,” Holzman said.

For more information on the American Literatures Initiative, visit www.americanliteratures.org.

— Written by Tom Rice
For the Office of News Communications