Category Archives: Journals

Landscape Journal Welcomes New Editor

Landscape Journal volume 36.2 features the first introduction by new editor Brian Lee, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Kentucky. Lee takes over for previous co-editors David Pitt (University of Minnesota) and Daniel Nadenicek (University of Georgia), and this most recent volume of Landscape Journal is the result of a collaboration between the two editorial teams, with Pitt and Nadenicek selecting the content and Lee moving the issue into production with UW Press staff.

While Landscape Journal’s scholarly focus will remain largely similar to the original aim and scope, Lee plans to introduce new sections to the publication, and wants to expand the number of book reviews as well as articles centered on teaching/learning scholarship. Lee has also updated the journal’s submission guidelines to take advantage of new publishing opportunities as well as efficiencies in the peer-review process. The guidelines can be found on the Landscape Journal website.

Dr. Brian Lee. Photo: Matt Barton.

Lee’s own scholarship focuses on service-learning, geospatial education, community watershed organizations, urban sprawl, and interior forest change. He is co-editor of the book Water in Kentucky: Natural History, Communities, and Conservation, published by the University Press of Kentucky (2017). He has received recognition for teaching excellence from the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.

To conclude his editor’s introduction, Lee calls on landscape architects to reflect on the state of the profession, creating “words or images that capture the essence of what landscape architecture is, could be, or should be to move the field forward.” By encouraging such content, Landscape Journal will continue to serve as a forum for scholars and practitioners of landscape architecture to analyze the discipline and chart new directions.

Evaluating Teacher Performance

Journal of Human Resources cover image

Journal of Human Resources contributor Matthew A. Kraft believes that we do teachers and students a disservice when we assess teachers based mainly on students’ standardized test scores. His article “Teacher Effects on Complex Cognitive Skills and Social-Emotional Competencies,” which will be published in the Winter 2019 issue of JHR, examined teachers’ influence on students’ social-emotional abilities. These include such qualities as growth mindset, perseverance, and effort in class, w hich have been linked to employment and health outcomes in later life. Kraft also studied student performance on complex open-ended tasks in math and reading—problems more complicated than those required by multiple choice tests—to understand how teachers affect critical thinking skills. Kraft found that a teacher’s ability to impact students’ standardized test scores was not always a good indicator of that teacher’s effectiveness at fostering complex cognitive skills and social-emotional skills, suggesting that we need better methods of evaluating teacher performance.

Kraft, who is an Associate Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University, joined us for a conversation touching on his background as an educator, his ideas on effective teaching techniques, and other topics. To learn more, read about the article on the JHR blog.

How did your time as a public school teacher influence your drive to research topics in education and/or the direction of that research?

As a public school teacher in Oakland and Berkeley, California, I often felt that teaching social-emotional skills had to come before teaching academic content. I tried to help my ninth grade students, most of whom were identified as at risk of dropping out, to feel like they belonged in school, to control their behavioral impulses, and to see value in what they were learning. My students did not take standardized tests, but if they did I doubt their performance would have captured the multiple ways in which I attempted to help them develop as young adults.

Do you remember any particular teachers that helped you develop social-emotional skills as a student?

I don’t ever remember being explicitly taught social-emotional skills. Instead, I remember teachers like Ms. Thomas, my tenth and twelfth grade English teacher, who set extremely high expectations but provided constant support to help us meet these expectations. She helped me to develop my own self-efficacy and perseverance by the way she taught core academic content.

Do you have a sense of what techniques teachers could use to develop students’ complex cognitive skills? Social-emotional skills? Maybe give an example or two.

In my opinion, project-based learning holds great promise for developing complex cognitive skills. Examples such as the curriculum developed by EL Education (formerly Expeditionary Learning) illustrate how authentic and complex tasks require students to use a multitude of skills rather than practicing individual skills in abstract isolation on worksheets.

How to teach social-emotional skills is very much an open question. I’m convinced that the best teachers both explicitly narrate and reinforce the value of these skills, while also designing their curriculum and pedagogical approaches to support their development through academic work. I think we learn things like persistence not by being told about the value of this skill, but by experiencing small successes in overcoming challenges with the support of educators.

What is one takeaway from your article that you’d like to communicate to nonscholars or policy makers?

Our understanding of teacher effectiveness, as well as the multiple measures used in new teacher evaluation systems, fail to capture the full range of ways in which teachers affect students’ success in school and life.

After this publication, where did your research go? Did you find yourself pursuing similar questions or changing course?

My current work in this area is focused on the importance of students’ sense of belonging in schools. Preliminary results suggest that schools and teachers who help support students to feel like they belong are creating environments where students develop their academic and social-emotional skills at faster rates.

Matthew Kraft is an Associate Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University. His research and teaching interests include the economics of education, education policy analysis, and applied quantitative methods for causal inference. His primary work focuses on efforts to improve educator and organizational effectiveness in K–12 urban public schools. He has published on topics including teacher coaching, teacher professional growth, teacher evaluation, teacher-parent communication, teacher layoffs, social and emotional skills, school working conditions, and extended learning time. His research has been featured in The Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Education Week, The 74 Million, public radio, and several blog sites.

Land Economics Journal Welcomes New Editor

Daniel J. Phaneuf

When Daniel W. Bromley assumed the editorship of Land Economics in 1974, the journal had just celebrated fifty years of continuous publication. Bromley is the Anderson-Bascom Professor (Emeritus) of Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and recipient of the 2011 Reimar Lüst Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Under Bromley’s leadership, the journal has flourished as a forum for scholarship on the economic aspects of natural and environmental resources. Now, forty-four years later, as Land Economics approaches its centennial, Bromley will pass the baton to Daniel J. Phaneuf.

Phaneuf is the Henry C. Taylor Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He boasts an impressive editorial resume, having served as the inaugural editor in chief of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE) and the managing editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. He is the president-elect of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

In his first “From the Editor” feature, which will appear in Land Economics volume 94 number 3 this July, Phaneuf expresses the ambition “to maintain the journal’s emphasis on empirical and policy-relevant research in the field, while continuing to expand its readership and author community to include broader swaths of researchers in the profession.” He continues, “My early emphasis will be on increasing the journal’s visibility, circulation, and overall impact—tasks for which I will call on current authors, readers, and reviewers for assistance and suggestions.” Phaneuf notes that he does not anticipate making any changes in the journal’s scholarly focus or the way it is managed.

Land Economics was established in 1925 by Richard T. Ely, founder of the American Economic Association, at the University of Wisconsin. (For more on Ely’s legacy, including the story of how he was tried as a socialist and anarchist in 1894, leading the UW Board of Regents to issue a groundbreaking defense of academic freedom, see this article.) Today, the articles in Land Economics contribute crucial knowledge to discussions of scholarly and public policy topics. The journal publishes research related to environmental quality, natural resources, housing, urban and rural land use, transportation, and other areas in both developed and developing country contexts.

Claire Eder joins UWP as Journals Marketing Specialist

Claire Eder

The University of Wisconsin Press has hired Claire Eder as its new Marketing Specialist in the Journals Division. Eder joins UWP from the literary journal Quarter After Eight, where she was editor in chief. She also has experience in scholarly publishing from a past graduate internship at the University Press of Florida.

Eder earned a PhD from Ohio University and an MFA from the University of Florida. Her poems and translations have appeared in the Cincinnati Review, PANK, Midwestern Gothic, and Guernica, among other publications.

Journals Manager Toni Gunnison notes, “Claire’s varied experience will be a great asset to UWP. We feel very fortunate to have her join our program.”

Eder states, “I’m excited to help the crucial research published in UWP journals reach a wider readership, as well as to join a friendly and skilled team. The University of Wisconsin Press is the perfect place to grow my knowledge of scholarly publishing.”

About the University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press, a research center housed within the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is a nonprofit publisher of books, journals, and other works. The Press’s mission is to embody and extend the research, education, and outreach mission of the University of Wisconsin through publishing:

scholarship, research, and educational materials of exceptional quality and distinction valued by a worldwide academic and professional community
works that serve the people of Wisconsin and document our region’s heritage
works that sustain a literate culture and foster an informed and engaged citizenry.

Honoring Mekemson era at Contemporary Literature

Mary Mekemson, hard at work editing Contemporary Literature

The Fall 2016 issue of Contemporary Literature marked the end of an era, the last to be edited by Mary Mekemson. Her nearly thirty years as managing editor with the journal were celebrated at a party in September, given in honor of her retirement. Mary received a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature in 1988 and took the position of managing editor with the journal in 1989. She has read, corrected, and revised every word in Contemporary Literature from 1989 to 2016. She was (and is) a superb editor. Her insistence upon clear writing improved the prose style and argument of many an essay. She regularly received praise and thanks from the authors with whom she worked, and her mentoring of the journal’s graduate-student editorial assistants was much appreciated. The editorial office staff of the journal and staff at UW Press wish Mary the very best.

Executive Editor Thomas Schaub, outgoing Managing Editor Mary Mekemson, new Managing Editor Eileen Ewing

Eileen Ewing is the new managing editor. “Having worked for Contemporary Literature for several years as its editorial and administrative associate, I am pleased to take on the role of managing editor. It allows me to continue my scholarly engagement with the literature of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I have a Ph.D. in English, with my dissertation focusing on twentieth-century women’s writing. I am particularly interested in the technical aspects of journal production and find the process of rejigging workflows for an electronic environment both stimulating and fun. I look forward to the challenges of manuscript editing and to carrying on the journal’s tradition of excellence.”

Contemporary Literature journal marks 57 years of publishing

This guest post is written by Eileen Ewing, Managing Editor of Contemporary Literature

This year marks Contemporary Literature’s fifty-seventh year of publication. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature was begun by graduate students in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960.

The journal publishes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. Over the decades, many literary luminaries have been featured in the journal, often early in their careers. CL published the first articles on Thomas Pynchon and Susan Howe and the first interviews with Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo. It also helped to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro, Eavan Boland, and J.M. Coetzee to American readers. At the links, read some fascinating recent interviews found exclusively in Contemporary Literature with poet Brian Kim Stefans, novelist Rachel Kushner, and novelist Anthony Cartwright.

L. S. Dembo, a scholar of modernist poetry, became editor of the journal in 1966 and shortened its title two years later. During his twenty-four years as editor, Dembo’s dedication to all that is exciting in modern and contemporary literature helped the journal to attain the international readership and large subscription base that he and the associate editors (Cyrena N. Pondrom, Betsy Draine, Phillip Herring, Jay Clayton, and Thomas Schaub) sought for it.

At Dembo’s retirement in 1990, Thomas Schaub took over as editor and shifted the parameters for submissions to work on post-World War II literature in English. The journal continued to publish interviews with established and emerging authors, articles featuring a diversity of critical practices, and reviews of scholarly books. Throughout the next two decades, Schaub and the associate editors (Richard Begam, Lynn Keller, Rafael Pérez‑Torres, Robert S. Baker, Jacques Lezra, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz) kept Contemporary Literature at the forefront of its field as a forum for discussing the issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies.

In 2009, the editorship of the journal was restructured as a collective led by Lynn Keller (poetry), Thomas Schaub (American fiction and drama), and Rebecca Walkowitz (British and Anglophone fiction and drama). The three co-editors worked closely with six new associate editors: Alan Golding, Adalaide Morris, Amy Hungerford, Sean McCann, Matthew Hart, and John Marx.

The current editorial collective is composed of Yogita Goyal (British and Anglophone fiction and drama), Michael LeMahieu and Steven Belletto (American fiction and drama), and Timothy Yu (poetry), with Thomas Schaub acting as executive editor. The associate editors are Elizabeth S. Anker, David James, Heather Houser, Jessica Pressman, Alan Golding, and Adalaide Morris.

Revised 7/10/17 to add byline.

Journal of Human Resources contributes to public policy debates

With this post, we launch an occasional series highlighting the University of Wisconsin Press journals program. UWP began publishing journals in the 1960s.

The Journal of Human Resources is among the most important journals in the field of microeconomics, with research relevant not only to scholars but to current debates in public policy. Findings and analysis published in JHR are often covered by major news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC’s Today Show, CNBC, and National Public Radio. The journal’s scope includes the economics of labor, development, health, education, discrimination, and retirement.

Founded in 1965 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, JHR continues to be housed within the Institute for Research on Poverty. JHR has had many accomplished editors over the years, including Sandra Black, who was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors in July 2015. The current editor, David Figlio, is the director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

A past JHR contributor of particular interest to the University of Wisconsin–Madison is the current UW Chancellor, Rebecca Blank. Her work on poverty and public assistance programs appeared in four articles in JHR before she became Deputy and Acting Secretary of Commerce in the Obama administration.

Intriguing examples of research presented in JHR can be seen in two upcoming articles. The first, “It’s Just a Game: The Super Bowl and Low Birth Weight” by Duncan, Mansour, and Rees, interprets data from 1969 to 2004 for mothers whose home team played in the Super Bowl. Read the Washington Post’s coverage here. “The 9/11 Dust Cloud and Pregnancy Outcomes” by Currie and Schwandt also examines birth outcomes, in this case in relation to the events of 9/11. Their findings were recently cited by National Geographic.

Other topics recently covered in JHR included the effect of birth order on the development of a child, the unintended consequences of China’s One-Child policy, the influence of school nutrition programs on childhood obesity, the effects of age on hiring practices, and the effect of the minimum wage on employment practices.

Learn more about The Journal of Human Resources.

View a free online sample issue.

UNIVERSITY PRESS WEEK 2016! THURSDAY BLOG TOUR: THROWBACK TO THE FUTURE

Throwback to the Future

On Day Four of University Press Week, visit these blog sites that highlight the past and future of university press publishing.

Yale University Press on mass media and the global village

Indiana University Press on Indiana’s Bicentennial Bookshelf

Seminary Co-op Bookstores reproduces their Fall 1983 newsletter

University of Michigan Press introduce two major projects: a digital archaeology monograph about excavating a Roman city, built on a video game platform; and a new digital publishing platform for information and data in multiple forms.

IPR License introduces its work as a fully transactional rights and licensing online marketplace

Columbia University Press on the South Asia Across the Disciplines series, a Mellon-funded collaborative project of Columbia University Press, the University of Chicago Press, and the University of California Press

University of Toronto Press Journals looks back and forward at online publishing platforms for journals

Also, plan to watch this event on Friday!

Scholars and Editors on Social Media
YouTube Live Friday, November 18, 12PM ET
Communities of scholars and editors have always been essential to the work of university presses. Today these communities often form and find each other via social media. An AAUP Art of Acquisitions Hangout brings together editors and scholars to explore this. Watch the livestream >

And view an impressive gallery of university presses collaborating with partners to form communities.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Inhuman Ecology: A review and brief interview

The current issue of SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism includes a review by Paul Harris of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Stone: An Inhuman Ecology (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which can be viewed on Project MUSE or Highwire. Subsequent to the review’s publication, Harris asked Cohen about his interest in stone and how he came to write Stone.

PAUL HARRIS At the end of your introduction, you cite the “Big Rock,” a glacial erratic on a hill in your neighborhood growing up, as a sort of original inspiration in your lifelong explorations in lithophilia, literary and otherwise. Can you flesh out a bit more how you came to have a strong affective resonance with stone? Are there other specific stones or sites that stand out in retrospect as exerting a particularly powerful influence on you?

JEFFREY COHEN I grew up just outside of Boston, not far from Lexington and Concord … and this geographic situation really matters since when I was a small child the USA was celebrating its national bicentennial. The colonial musketeering, parades and flags and tricorns and redcoats were just too much for me. I became obsessed with deeper pasts. I’m sure that’s why I was eventually drawn to medieval studies. But I was also fascinated by the temporality of stone, how erratics like the Big Rock bore witness to a narrative of swamps and dinosaurs indifferent to the small human histories that bubble and pop around them. The Big Rock (what a poetic name!) was close to home and yet a constant invitation to the faraway. What I did not reveal in the book is that I tricked other children in the neighborhood into believing that if you sat on that rock at the right time of day you would be transported into another dimension and likely not find your way back. Well, maybe there is some truth to that.

I should also note that Stone is a book that keeps beginning: I tell a variety of stories for how I started the project in it, of various landscapes and encounters that triggered the project. Although they contradict each other somewhat, all of them are true, in the same way that stone is process more than object.

PAUL HARRIS I like how the physical and narrative powers ascribed to The Big Rock make it become a portal—one might call it a “fantastic” stone…. Your answer broaches a question that often surfaces in relation to deep time or Big History: is a turn to this temporality informed or accompanied by a desire to escape history? Or at least the politics of the present?

I enjoyed the recursive style and narrative form of Stone very much, and wondered about how such an intricately interwoven book came together, over the “long duration” you reference in the acknowledgements. When did you start working on the text, and what was your method?

JEFFREY COHEN Rather than a fantastic stone I’d call the Big Rock an adventurous one: full of futurity (advent, avenir) through its durability, its intimacy with a long past, its relentless suggestion of possibility. I’m not sure that what such adventurous objects offer is escape from the present exactly: more an unexpected widening of ambit than a flight from particular circumstance. Sitting on the Big Rock was always an essential component of the stories I told: that is, the narratives were always grounded in a time and a place, even if in lithic companionship they attempted to imagine larger prospects.

Stone took a lifetime to compose, since I have always been attracted to the substance. Or maybe the book took about six years to write, with the last three given over almost completely to its composition. It took me a long time to find the form the book wanted, so I discarded tens of thousands of words I’d composed and restructured the volume repeatedly. Once I understood though that the form of the book might perform its argument (because stone is always about recursivity within difference, circuits that open wider at each cycle and yet do come back in time) – and once I realized that I could not pretend that the scholarly and the personal are two disjunct realms — then Stone began to cohere. I was a little too obsessive with the project. Toward the end I injured my shoulder from poor posture at my laptop, a battle scar I still bear. Stone hurts! But I will never tire of its contemplation.

Paul A. Harris is co-editor of SubStance and professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. He served as president of the International Society for the Study of Time from 2004-2013 and edited the recent SubStance issue David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time. His current project is The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is professor of English and director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at the George Washington University. His recent work includes the edited collections Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minnesota, 2013) and, with Lowell Duckert, Elemental Ecocriticism. Recently he co-wrote a short book called Earth (forthcoming from Bloomsbury in early 2017) with planetary geologist Lindy Elkins-Tanton.

It’s our 80th birthday! 1936-2016

“Publication is as much a function of the university as teaching or research [and] an obligation that every great university owes to itself and to society.”
—The University of Wisconsin Committee on University Publications, April 13, 1936

In 2016, we mark the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the University of Wisconsin Press. Throughout the calendar year, we’ll be blogging about the history of the Press, as well as welcoming guest posts from our UWP authors and editors.

Subscribe to our blog (at right) to read more UWP history throughout the coming year.

Livia Appel

1936 On April 13, 1936, the University of Wisconsin faculty senate enacts legislation to “publish particularly meritorious manuscripts as books using the imprint ‘The University of Wisconsin Press.’” Livia Appel is hired as managing editor.

1940s Hit hard by the toll of war—paper shortages, staff shortages, and the near impossibility of finding printers with facilities for “non-essential” work, the Press nearly ceases operations. 0469-165w

1950s The Press publishes the two-volume Classics in Translation edited by University of Wisconsin faculty Paul L. MacKendrick and Herbert M. Howe. It will become our all-time bestseller.

1960s The new Journals Division publishes its first volumes of Contemporary Literature, Luso-Brazilian Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Journal of Land Economics, Arctic Anthropology, and Monatshefte. Five of these continue as UWP journals, joined by later acquisitions.

1970s University budget cuts result in the Press reducing by half both its staff and the number of new publications.

1980s The Press publishes its largest-ever book in a single volume: the 1056-page Fishes of Wisconsin, by George C. Becker of the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. (It’s now UWP_Spring2011_catalog_12610 available free online.)

1990s UW–Madison professor of art Warren G. Moon dies, leaving an endowment of $700,000 for the book series Wisconsin Studies in Classics. His legacy continues to support a thriving series.

2000s The Press begins publishing journals and books in both print and electronic formats. Our bestselling e-book is Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders by William R. Drennan.

2010s Several new book series are launched: Critical Human Rights, the Harvey Goldberg Series in Understanding and Teaching History, and Languages and Folklore of the Upper Midwest. Three new journals in African Studies are added to the Press’s publications: Mande Studies, Ghana Studies, and African Economic History.