The New Public Scholarship
The New Public Scholarship encourages alliances between scholars and communities by publishing writing that emerges from publicly engaged and intellectually consequential cultural work. The series will focus on the U.S., although it will actively seek work that introduces comparative or global frameworks. We hope that the series will attract serious readers who are invested in both creating and thinking about public culture and public life. Under the rubric of "public scholar," we embrace campus-based artists, humanists, cultural critics and engaged artists working the public, nonprofit, or private sector. The editors seek useful work growing out of engaged practices in cultural and educational arenas. We are also interested in books that offer new paradigms for doing and theorizing public scholarship itself. Indeed, validating public scholarship through an evolving set of concepts and arguments is central to The New Public Scholarship.
The universe of potential contributors and readers is growing rapidly. We are teaching a generation of students for whom civic education and community service learning are quite normative. The civic turn in art and design has affected educational and cultural institutions of many kinds. In light of these developments, we feel that The New Public Scholarship offers a timely innovation in serious publishing.
We are launching the series in Fall 2009 with Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina, edited by Amy Koritz and George Sanchez. This volume examines "the fortitude of civic engagement practice in New Orleans." Through a series of essays by contributors who speak from different places, projects, professions, and life experiences, the volume becomes a dialogue on the fate and future of civic engagement after Katrina.
We hope that you would direct colleagues and students to books published in the series; encourage scholars and graduate students to consider submitting their work for publication; offer your reflections on the series as it develops; suggest projects for future development.
digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
