To celebrate our 125th anniversary this year, we are taking the opportunity to highlight and thank a selection of key figures in LUP’s recent history. To start this series, our Chief Executive Officer Anthony Cond reflects on the impact of LUP’s former Editorial Advisory Board Chair Charles Forsdick following their first meeting almost twenty years ago.
‘You must meet the boy professor.’ That refrain echoed through my first few weeks at LUP. Following the Press’s 2004 overhaul, there was a unique opportunity to rethink the editorial direction of a long-established university press as it moved away from the Architecture-to-Zoology model of trying to be all things to all people and focused on just a few areas of scholarly excellence.
As a good generalist editor, I was making my way through a long list of contacts across the University of Liverpool, seeking subject-specific guidance from genuine experts who might help to shape what LUP could be. Each one provided valuable insights into their own field, most answered my concluding ‘whose door should I knock on next?’ question with the same response.
Of course, the ‘boy professor’, when I finally met him, was nothing of the sort, although he had been appointed James Barrow Professor of French several years earlier at the age of 32. Charles Forsdick exuded enthusiasm and intelligence – of the sort that nets a congratulatory first (the one where the examiners simply stand and applaud) from Oxford — but best of all generosity.
Among other things, Charles handed me the text of a talk he had recently given at the University of Bristol, titled French Studies in the UK. It became a star to steer the Press’s French list by as LUP grew and blossomed over the next decade. As Maeve McCusker, President of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies and Professor of French and Caribbean Studies at Queen’s University Belfast notes, ‘Charles Forsdick’s work with LUP has been exemplary– he has a clear strategic vision, a forensic attention to detail, and, crucially, the energy to make things happen. The languages publishing landscape has been expanded and energised through his work.’ Meanwhile, Jane Hiddleston, Professor of Literatures in French at the University of Oxford, observes Forsdick’s skill in creating, ‘an excellent home for high quality research in the discipline, promoting both early career researchers and scholars at the top of their field.’ Both Jane and Maeve, now unquestionably scholars at the top of their field, were ECRs when they first published with the Press.
Those who have worked alongside Charles are similarly effusive. His co-editor, and another long-term LUP collaborator, Martin Munro, who is Winthrop-King Professor of French at Florida State University, shrewdly comments that, ‘Charles Forsdick is a once-in-a-generation figure, who has through his work with LUP made it the foremost venue in the world for work in contemporary French and Francophone studies.’
The impact of Charles’ editorial input into LUP would inevitably stray beyond Francophone borders. Assuming the role of Chair of the Editorial Advisory Board — the dozen-strong central editorial body of the Press, akin to OUP’s delegates and CUP’s syndics — he read and commented astutely on every book proposal put forward by the editorial team in quarterly EAB meetings spanning a decade. More than a thousand book proposals read with generosity and insight for nothing more than service to scholarship, innumerable cups of tea and an unending curiosity. That he juggled this endeavour with national leadership positions such as REF Sub-panel Chair for Modern Languages, AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for Translating Cultures and latterly as the British Academy’s Lead Fellow for Languages, while delivering a slew of acclaimed publications of his own, makes this feat all the more remarkable.
Charles recently left the University of Liverpool to become Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge. It seems fitting, therefore, to make him the first focus of a new ‘In Praise of…’ series, in which we will be acknowledging those people outside of the Press’s staff who have helped to make Liverpool University Press what it is today.
In this case, the contribution goes far beyond a single publisher, as captured perfectly by Kaiama Glover, Professor of African American Studies and French at Yale University:
‘Charles Forsdick is a singular presence in our academy; he has contributed invaluably to shaping the field of francophone (and) postcolonial studies both as a rigorous and prolific individual researcher and, through his stewardship at LUP, as a generous creator of crucial spaces for intellectual community.’
In celebration of Charles’ contribution to LUP, we have made Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France, edited by Charles Forsdick, Etienne Achille, and Lydie Moudileno, free to read for a limited period.
Access the ebook for free on the LUP website >
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