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Liverpool University Press: Forward-looking for 120 years

This year Liverpool University Press will be 120 years old.

The UK’s third oldest university press, after Oxford and Cambridge, came into being on the 4th October 1899 with its founding Secretary/Director an Irish immigrant to Liverpool ‘possessed (of) a semi-divine inspiration, being endowed with a fertile imagination and a robust constitution,’  who left school at the age of 14 but rose off the back of an aptitude for languages to become the University Librarian and a globally recognised expert on the Romani.  John Sampson’s threads of migration, Ireland, languages, Romani Studies and Liverpool are of course still in evidence in LUP’s publishing today, so too the founding memorandum’s specification that ‘the work of the Press shall maintain a high standard of excellence.’

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John Sampson, founding Secretary (Director) of Liverpool University Press

Across 2019 we will be celebrating and exploring 120 years of LUP through events, blog posts, partnerships, archival research, an elegant anniversary logo, the hashtag #LUP120 and the opportunity to read some of our books and journals for free.

As with the scholarly communities it serves, LUP’s fortunes waxed and waned over many decades but the unfailing commitment of Press staff, authors and editors, and a wider community of scholars who understood the distinctive and important contribution of university press publishing, have helped to lay the strong foundation on which LUP stands today.  Publishing more than 100 books a year, 33 journals and a number of digital products, and still the only university press to have won both The Bookseller and IPG awards for Academic Publisher of the Year, Liverpool University Press has been widely acclaimed for its willingness to embrace change.  To that end, we have chosen to celebrate the future as well as the past in 2019 with the strapline ‘Forward-looking for 120 years.’

At a time when scholarly communication is undergoing scrutiny and the higher education policy sands are shifting, the importance of university presses has been largely under-articulated and we hope that this milestone anniversary is an opportunity to remedy that. For, as the introduction to The University Press of Liverpool: A Record of Progress, 1899-1946 (LUP, 1947) makes clear: ‘This is a continuous story which, in the main, is a tale of high ideal…  There can be no better advertisement of a University than a University Press steadily producing books of high standing and sending them all over the world.’

 

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News

‘Ethnography and Modern Languages’ published on MLO invites readers to join the discussion

The article ‘Ethnography and Modern Languages’ by Naomi Wells et. al has been published on the Liverpool University Press open access platform, Modern Languages Open. Readers are invited to join the discussion on the role of the ethnographic in Modern Languages and can leave their response directly on the MLO platform.

In response to recent debates and discussions on the subject, the article proposes ways in which an engagement with ethnographic practices and theories can be transformative in relation to approaches to Modern Languages teaching, research and wider engagement, as well as how such approaches can be more effectively supported within and across institutions.

Read the complete article on Modern Languages Open >

To add a response, simply go to the article on the MLO platform and click on the ‘discussions’ tab to the right of the article.

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News

Fabrizio Nevola joins Exeter Studies in Medieval Europe as Series Editor

Liverpool University Press is delighted to announce that Professor Fabrizio Nevola is joining Exeter Studies in Medieval Europe as a series editor.

Fabrizio Nevola is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Exeter. He has held research fellowships at the University of Warwick, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Medici Archive Project, and Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence. His book, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner International Book Award for Architecture. Nevola’s recent work includes Hidden Florence, a digital humanities collaboration with industry-leaders in GPS-triggered city audio tours that created a mobile phone App guide to Renaissance Florence (published 2014; updates 2016).

Fellow series editors Professor Yolanda Plumley, Professor Oliver Creighton and Professor Anthony Musson said ‘Fabrizio is a leading international specialist on late medieval and Early Modern art history and visual culture, and has published extensively on urban spaces, palaces and households in Italy and on the ritual use of public spaces, and urban identity, and is currently researching city streets as social spaces and urban iconography. He will bring invaluable experience and expertise to the series, especially as we develop major strands in the areas of material culture and the environment, and on the arts and society.’

Exeter Studies in Medieval Europe explores the history of societies, culture, the arts and the environment in the Middle Ages. Complementing the renowned Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies series, it has a chronological range of c. 500-1500, a broad European focus and a multi-disciplinary perspective. It includes three major strands:

  • Material culture, including the applied arts and architecture
  • Music, sound studies, art history and visual culture
  • Archaeology and landscape history, including the urban environment

If you would like to submit a book proposal to the series please get in touch with Clare Litt at clare.litt@liverpool.ac.uk. You can find out more about the series here.

 

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Postgrowth Imaginaries now openly available on Modern Languages Open

Liverpool University Press is delighted to announce that the second monograph to feature on Modern Languages Open is Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain by Luis I. Prádanos.

Postgrowth Imaginaries brings together environmental cultural studies and postgrowth economics to examine radical cultural shifts sparked by the global financial crisis. The globalization of an economic culture addicted to constant growth destroys the ecological planetary systems while failing to fulfil its social promises. A transition toward what Prádanos calls ‘postgrowth imaginaries’—the counterhegemonic cultural sensibilities that are challenging the growth paradigm—is well underway in the Iberian Peninsula today.

Chloe Johnson, Commissioning Editor for Modern Languages, said, ‘We are very excited to be publishing a second monograph on Modern Languages Open. Open Access is something we are eager to support and I am thrilled that Luis’ book will be freely available on MLO.’

Luis I. Prádanos says, ‘Postgrowth Imaginaries pushes to enlarge the space of what is visible, thinkable, intelligible, perceptible, sayable, and, more importantly, desirable. I hope that if we persist in the construction of postgrowth imaginaries, we may eventually be able to displace the dogmatic neoliberal sequestration of reality and its monologic motto, ‘there is no alternative’. Politics, as Rancière insists, ‘replaces the dogmatism of truth with the search for conditions of possibility’. We desperately need to envision postgrowth imaginaries in which to invest our affects, identities, energy, and creativity. Our (good) life quite literally depends on it. Our lack of political imagination (or, more accurately, our obduracy in maintaining our attachment to the harmful growth imaginary) is undermining such conditions of possibility. My hope is that this book does its humble part in contributing to our communitarian and collaborative search for the conditions of possibility for socially desirable and ecologically viable postgrowth societies to emerge.’

On reviewing the book, Katarzyna Olga Beilin from the University of Wisconsin said “Prádanos’s book will become a necessary reference for all those who will subsequently write about post-growth, environmental studies in the Spanish/Iberian context and related subjects” and Luis Moreno-Caballud from the University of Pennsylvania said that the work “constitutes an urgent, enlightening, and empowering reflection about a crucial subject of our time”.

You can find out more about the book here and read it for free here.

Liverpool University Press is a proud supporter of Open Access publishing with over 40 OA monographs currently available. You can find out more about our OA policy here and browse some of our OA titles on the OAPEN library. 

News

LUP extends support for author sharing by adopting Kudos S-PDF

Kudos, the award-winning platform for managing research dissemination, has announced 7 more publisher partners have signed up to switch on the Shareable PDF (S-PDF) feature and enable their authors to use Kudos for managing and evaluating PDF-based sharing.

S-PDF makes it easy for researchers to create and share plain language summaries of their work, encapsulated in PDFs that can be uploaded to PDF-based sharing services.

The service has been widely adopted by authors as well as publishers, with over 5,000 authors having shared S-PDFs since launch. They benefit from S-PDF’s ability to ‘report back’ on the readership of work in otherwise closed websites, enabling the discovery value of these sites to be compared on a like-for-like basis with other online and offline sharing efforts, via Kudos’ unique dissemination management service.

S-PDFs link readers through to full text on publisher websites, and dovetail neatly with other initiatives designed to help researchers improve copyright-compliant visibility for their work on scholarly collaboration networks and via other PDF-based sharing platforms and media.

As well as Liverpool University Press, the most recent publishers to sign up are:

Annals of Saudi Medicine
ASTM International
BMJ
Edinburgh University Press
Journal of Neurosurgery Publishing Group (JNSPG)

Read the full press release here.

Find out more about how Kudos can help increase the impact of your research here.