You’ve worked for a number of robust institutions in the last fifteen years. Do you feel the role of a university press has changed in campus life since you began your career? If so, what do you see as the most important ways that presses can engage and support their intellectual ecosystems today, beyond publishing books?

I started in university press publishing in September 1999, so the number is closer to (ulp!) 27 years. In that timespan, I’ve worked for three presses: University Press of Mississippi, University of Georgia Press, and now University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Press). Those are three very different presses—the first a consortium funded collectively by the eight state universities of the state (which means that I didn’t actually work on any university campus); the second also based at a public university but this time tethered to a single institution; and the third a private university with a substantially larger endowment than the previous two. 

So, the role of a university press depends on where the press is located, how the press is funded, and who the press reports to. Penn Press and University of Georgia Press report to and are part of the university’s libraries. University Press of Mississippi’s larger governing body is the state’s Institute of Higher Learning, rather than any one state university—though each of the state’s eight public universities supply funding to the press. There are myriad reporting structures for presses, and one thing that presses can do is help their constituents—faculty, administration, university donors, grad and undergraduate students—understand what we do and how we operate within the press. 

There are several ways to do that. Press editors and other staff periodically hold on-campus workshops, much like this initiative at the University of Iowa, in which presses can inform interested parties about how to publish, what the given press does publish, and why it’s valuable to the university’s ecosystem as a disseminator of scholarly knowledge and cultural activity. Presses can serve as flagships of the larger missions of their universities. Presses often offer publishing internships for undergraduates, giving them knowledge of the industry, and fellowships for graduate students, giving them both knowledge and professional development. Presses often publish in areas in which the university itself has strong, public-facing commitments, and thus publishers can highlight the faculty’s activity in that way as well. Presses often hold forums about scholarly communications as a whole, so that people interested in how publishing fits into larger issues facing us all can be informed from a press’s perspective.
 

Writers often work against themselves. Do you find they tend to hit the same, or similar, obstacles in the creative process? And how do you understand the role of an editor in overcoming these stumbling blocks?

Of course they do. In the early stages, they over-explain their citations while under-articulating what they’re adding to the discourse. Scholarly writers so often submerge their contributions into the background of their contextualization that it’s hard for an editor to grasp what the scholar is doing that’s new, necessary, and different. Conversely, authors often oversell their works: “My project is the first one that does XYZ," “My project breaks new ground"—which was actually broken by take-your-pick scholar 50 years ago—“in my given field.” Striking a balance between what’s truly new and what’s adding usefully to an older context is admittedly hard, but it’s a problem that comes up a lot. 

Also, writers tend to underestimate how much time it will take them to research and process the research, much less to write effectively about what they’ve researched and processed. I try my best to foresee those blocks and to let them know from an editor’s bird's-eye perspective how their processes might work in actuality.
 

What kind of project—or writer—poses the greatest challenge to a press editor?

A project that’s a clear no is generally easy to discern. It’s poorly written or articulated or it’s in an area that we don’t publish, or it doesn’t offer any new ideas about or arguments on well-trodden territory. A clear yes follows the same trajectory from the opposite direction in that I’m on board with it from the first couple of pages, which hook me immediately. Oddly, the most difficult projects are those that are, in some way, the in-between ones. I mean this in several ways. There are projects that present challenges because they are interdisciplinary, straddling two or more disciplines and thus methodologies and standards of operating. These pose difficulties in terms of finding peer reviewers who are conversant in both fields; in positioning the project internally to press colleagues so that it makes sense to everyone who will be involved in making it into a book; and in gauging who the audience(s) for the project will be, and how to reach them.

Then there are those projects for which I’m on the fence, that is to say, projects that excite me in some way, that are innovative, but which I know need more developmental work than usual to make them viable. In-betweeners can also be projects that personally interest me but which either don’t fully align with the subject areas in which the press publishes or that glance at certain subject areas while perhaps engaging more fully in another in which the press isn’t as conversant. 
 

Conversely, what kind of project brings the most satisfaction?

I love the big, deep-thinking projects that swing for the fences conceptually and which are unafraid to be bold both in their claims and in their willingness to engage outside of the traditional humanities sphere. I love manuscripts that rewire my brain intellectually but which aim to reach out to my curious working-class grandmamas with high-school educations. When the high-mindedness fuses with the high-spiritedness, I’m excited. This fusion is rarer than I would like to see in the academy.

If you could get academics to stop doing one thing in their writing (or in their proposals) what would it be? 

Writing overly long historiographies. I see this most often with first books or with books that are derived from dissertations; this is often the same thing. Scholars feel the need to prove their academic bona fides by citing every possible work they’ve read to get their PhDs, as if they are still “A” students desperate to show what they’ve learned rather than foregrounding what they are adding to our understanding of their given fields. I would rather a proposal start by explicating what the project is doing that’s new, that fills a void in the scholarly terrain, that fits into a gap of human understanding, instead of showing me that the scholar has read—or, just as often, cited without having fully digested—all of the “right” sources. When writing a monograph, authors need to write as if they are an acknowledged expert in this terrain and writing for an audience beyond their dissertation committees.
 

Finally, a personal question: you’ve mentioned in previous interviews that film and film criticism have been important to you in your life. Some films can sustain an inner conversation for years—what films have you seen that have stayed with you?

My answer could trail off for pages and pages, without interest to anyone other than myself, so I’ll try to keep it short. Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies is one of the greatest movies about World War II, and the harsh legacy of war on us all that’s ever been made; Takahata’s compatriot, Hayao Miyazaki, made Porco Rosso, about roughly the same period, from a more cockeyed perspective. Both are treasures. Both are cartoons—so what? I feel like I’m falling into the screen (no matter how big or small it is in actuality) whenever I watch Jacques Tati’s Play Time. Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding is a greatness that keeps revealing itself further with every re-viewing. And then there is John Sayles’s Lone Star, which gets so much right about my home state (Texas), about the complexities of race and class and fatherhood, that I forgive it its rare narrative missteps. After all, as Pauline Kael (one of my critical avatars) wrote, great movies are rarely perfect movies. The imperfections in an otherwise sublime work are, in fact, what make me want to talk back to a movie, book, musical piece, or any other artwork all the more. Kael’s gargantuan collection, For Keeps, has meant a lot to my critical thought over the years, as has Hilton Als’s White Girls (which is only occasionally about film).