Welcome to our weekly roundup of news from university presses! Once again, there is a lot to share this week from our fellow academic publishing houses and much to learn on What SUP at the social university presses. From cloistered nuns to baseball players on steroids, this week is incredibly diverse. What did you read this week?
In honor of Women’s History month, University of North Carolina Press shares a reading list from the field of Women’s Studies.
How can we prevent innocent people from being convicted? Harvard University Press looks at law professor Brandon Garrett’s book Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong which takes on this too-frequent occurrence and shows how the criminal justice system can work to avoid such calamities. Garrett compares how we react to a crashed plane to the way we should look at wrongful convictions — an event that leads to serious investigation and reform so it doesn’t happen again.
Duke University Press features an excerpt from Bionic Ballplayers: Risk, Profit, and the Body as Commodity, 1964-2007. There, we learn about steroid use in the baseball industry and its larger implications for what the body represents.
During the Holocaust in Lithuania, the Nazi regime established a Jewish ghetto in Kovno. In 1941 and 1942, the members of this ghetto’s police force wrote a history of these events and hid it. Now, decades later, this secret history has been found and examined by author Samuel Schalkowsky. Indiana University Press has a conversation with about the resulting book, The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police.
It was big news in science last week when scientists in the South Pole found evidence of gravitational waves from the earliest moments of the universe. The University of Chicago Press has an interview with scholar Harry Collins, author of Gravity’s Ghost and Big Dog: Scientific Discovery and Social Analysis in the Twenty-First Century, to talk about what these results might mean.
MIT Press has two posts on philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek’s work this week. Both pieces highlight Zizek’s work with eye toward Lacan and questions of theology. We also get a bite-sized excerpt from his magnum opus, The Parallax View.
Oxford University Press lets us peer into the world of cloistered nuns through Abbie Reese’s book Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns. This post features an interview between Reese and managing editor Troy Reeves about this visual and oral narrative. There’s also a bonus clip from Reese’s conversation with Sister Mary Nicolette!
Ep. 134—The Therapeutic Benefits of Reading Greek Tragedy