Join our Email List
Although we’ve been in the midst of several heat waves here in New York City (if I hear the weatherman use the word “sweltering” one more time, I might cry!), I’m already starting to think about fall. In between dreaming of cozy sweaters and pumpkin pie, I’m hard at work coordinating our attendance at half a dozen academic conferences in some of our most important fields. A fan of checklists and packing, this is one of my favorite responsibilities. However, it can certainly also get a bit overwhelming making sure every part of the process gets taken care of while maintaining all of the different deadlines for each event. Continue reading “Exhibitor Tables at Academic Conferences in Theory and Practice”
Category: Blog
On the Evening News, the Galapagos Islands, and the Purpose of the Academy
A post by Journals Marketing Manager Young Lee.
Whenever I watch the news these days, I know I’m in for a depressing half-hour, especially in New York, where crimes big and small seem to happen nonstop. Whether it’s a subway groper, a child falling out of a seventh story window, or the violence in Syria, I am starting to understand that no news really is the only good news.
This steady stream of bad news makes me wish for a Garden of Eden on this world, a place that’s a little more innocent, and I’m reminded of a trip I took last December to the Galapagos Islands, famous for their role in the inception of Darwin’s theory of evolution. What struck me most about the islands was that, with wildlife galore and few predators, all the animals seemed to coexist so peacefully. Sea lions casually rested their heads on iguanas and birds never worried about their eggs being eaten. Tropical flamingos and penguins lived side-by-side. It was the oddest thing I had ever seen and it was inspiring. Continue reading “On the Evening News, the Galapagos Islands, and the Purpose of the Academy”
Gender, Sports, and Culture: The Victorians and Us
Graduate school ruins your ability to view anything related to your topic of study with an unacademic eye. This is fine if your topic doesn’t come up every day like, say, Byzantine art, but when you choose something that crops up often, like the influence of American music on Continental youth culture in the 1950s, it means you’ll be mentally revising your thesis every time you hear “Johnny B. Goode.” I’m reminded of this phenomenon every Olympiad because I wrote my master’s thesis on sports in Nazi Germany, using the party’s sports policy up until the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a window into their ideas about race and its intersection with political priorities before the war. The fast-approaching 2012 Olympics already have me mentally revising my thesis (something I’m sure I’ll be doing on my death bed), but the most recent issue of our journal Critical Survey has me wondering if I didn’t miss an altogether more interesting topic- sports and gender. Continue reading “Gender, Sports, and Culture: The Victorians and Us”
Girls and Dolls: A Note on Images from the Latest Issue of Girlhood Studies
Most of my work deals with text, so it was a bit of a treat when I opened up the files for the latest Girlhood Studies and found them chock full of images of dolls. This journal covers many themes related to the challenges and dangers facing girls all over the world – it’s always such a pleasure to work on but I was particularly excited to see an issue that also speaks to the creative and serious play of girlhood. Dolls, needless to say, are cultural artefacts and reflect the society that makes them as well as the girls who play with them: an American Girl doll capturing an immigrant Jewish girlhood essentially whitewashed of tenements and the memory of pogroms; nineteenth-century paper dolls embodying both moral tales and fashion plates; Barbie and her Dream House reflecting the dimensions of modern architecture. All three of these examples are mediated by commercial culture and present tensions between cultural constructs and individual play. Continue reading “Girls and Dolls: A Note on Images from the Latest Issue of Girlhood Studies”
Moving In
Since 2002, Berghahn Books made its home on Wall Street. Well, not Wall Street exactly, but close enough for Occupy Wall Street, which set up camp across from our offices and close enough that all the good lunch spots were too expensive for anyone not eating on an expense account. As of this March, however, we now work in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
If you’re unfamiliar with the neighborhood, you may be asking yourself, where is Dumbo and why does it have such a horrible name?
Making Social Science Research Relevant
I recently attended the Applied Anthropology meeting in Baltimore, MD. Surrounded by a colorful collection of scholars, activists, practitioners, policy makers, and researchers within academia but also those who have found their calling in the private sectors or NGOs (whether through preference or frankly lack of jobs in academia), the mantras of making anthropology accessible to a broader public on the one hand as well as enacting policy change through research results on the other, ran deep. This could be said for many a discipline where the wish for scholars to reach a larger audience is a common theme yet it is faced with so many challenges. I should note that I make the distinction here between informing an audience with the intent purpose of enabling change (in perspectives, policies, or priorities) and the “general reader”, a type of potentially lucrative yet high risk nebulous readership that sends many salivating publishers (unfortunately with university presses often leading the charge) hurtling over the cliffs of trade publishing to splatter down below on the rocks of high returns and watery scholarship. Continue reading “Making Social Science Research Relevant”
Welcome to the Berghahn Books Blog!
The year 2012 marks a number of exciting milestones for Berghahn Books. Not only do we enter our 18th year since Marion published our first two books in 1994 (Uniting Germany and Imperial Germany), but we also started the year with a much-anticipated move for our New York offices from lower Manhattan across the East river to DUMBO, Brooklyn. We’re now well settled in – just a few final walls to paint and then there’s that minor plumbing issue with the kitchenette sink….but we’re otherwise enjoying the gentle rumble of the trains crossing the Manhattan bridge and lunch breaks on the waterfront next to the carousel. Continue reading “Welcome to the Berghahn Books Blog!”