A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

A parson tucked away in the tiny village of Ousby who formulates an evidence-free theory of the evolution of the earth.

A forgotten poet who imagines that the citizens of Saturn enjoy a marvelous overhead view of planetary rings.

A nutritionist whose dietary recommendations give clients so much energy that they exercise themselves to extinction.

Along with many other unusual persons granted a second life in university press books, these eighteenth-century thinkers could be generously styled creative, but they might also, more accurately, be deemed wrong.  Such eccentric if occasionally entertaining earners of that off-putting adjective, incorrect, epitomize the many real and fictional figures who missed the mark while showing a bit of creativity.  Whether bad leaders who erred their way to their destinations, such as HMS Bounty Commander William Bligh; whether “tech” inventors who max out at 98% accuracy, such as those who struggled to make an accurate clock for use in maritime navigation; or whether make-believe heroines like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, who never seems to know what is happening to her yet who ends up as lady of the manor, the erroneous outnumber the accurate in studies of the past.

Aided and abetted by an assortment of university presses, I have spent most of my professional life in (sometimes) creative commentary on the vast corpus of early modern errors.  A life spent in nonstop discussion of ideas that stand no chance of being true might qualify as “creative” in the worst sense: a diddling away of a tiny bit of talent on miscellaneous curiosities.  In this peculiar diversion of educational resources, I am far from alone.  By the brutally pragmatic standards of twenty-first century industry, the vast majority of what university presses publish must count as little more than a distraction from the pursuit of productivity.  The prognosis is not much better for those actively creating the cultural history of our own era.  Given the proliferation of discredited ideas in the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, we may infer that most of our notions will eventually end up among quaint collectibles, like old farm equipment nailed to the walls of a Cracker Barrel restaurant.

Creative thinking—figuring out the meaning of our history or artfully understanding the culture of yesteryear or discovering something in the past that has unexpected applications in the present or future—is largely about the sympathetic stewardship of error: the willingness to cut some slack to the past and to appreciate what even crackpots (perhaps inadvertently) achieved.  After all, mainstream figures like astronomers William and Caroline Herschel can seem freakish, what with sitting out, night after night, a brother and sister team looking at luminous smudges about whose true nature they have nary a clue.  In the effort to appreciate the productive irregularities of the past, university presses make a colossal contribution.  At 250 pages and under the imprimatur of a legitimizing institution, a university press book provides the perfect vehicle in which to observe not only one or two historically significant mistakes but to view manageable arrays of discarded phenomena or ideas—to reveal worthwhile patterns amidst a bevy of blunders.  The significance of the university press book as a genre expressing creative curatorial concern for the variably valuable paraphernalia of the past is easy to overlook.  A comparison between the compact modern university press book and an intelligent but unwieldy commercial synoptic production such as Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization will immediately show the amazing ability of the university press format to extract an abundance of knowledge from unusual topics.

When not studying the peculiarities of the long eighteenth century, I spent a certain amount of career time—over a decade—in “faculty” or “shared” university governance, dealing with the astounding range of people, activities, and administrative arrangements in a multi-campus public university.  This experience repeatedly showed the centrality of university presses for whatever remains of creativity in modern mega-universities.  By persisting in the protection of impracticalities, university presses keep their sponsor institutions honest, open, and, in a word, creative.  Reliably and consistently attracting media attention, university presses remind everyone that higher education really should be about innovative thought rather than about sport, grants, and state legislatures.  Throughout my years in university governance, I never ceased to be amazed at the reluctance among powerful administrators, when budget cuts came along, to withdraw even the slightest bit of support from a costly press that would never turn a profit.  Such, to make an odd comparison, is the power that religious symbols exert over Dracula.  Books that gleefully celebrate knowledge without concern for gain dazzle every eye and sear through resistance. They surprise even the skeptical with their sacramental power. The more peculiar, offbeat, and creative the volume, the stronger the enchantment.  Paying heed, in a university press book, to all those historical figures who made creative mistakes thus brings us happily back to the true, energetically creative purpose of universities.

Kevin L. Cope is Adams Professor of English Literature at Louisiana State University. He is the author or editor of dozens of books and articles, including Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment and, with Cedric Reverand, Paper, Ink, and Achievement: Gabriel Hornstein and the Revival of Eighteenth-Century Scholarship. He is also the founder and editor of the annual journal 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. A former member of the National Governing Council of the American Society for University Professors, Cope is regularly referenced in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and is a frequent guest on radio and television news and talk shows.

Bucknell University’s series Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850 invites expressions of interest for essays or collections of essays that highlight the scholarship of teaching the long eighteenth century including the Romantic era. Proposals for edited volumes need not have firm commitments from authors at this stage, but should detail possible contributors and topics.

The long eighteenth century was a period of complex interest in the processes of learning and education, exploration of the natural and human-made world, and questions about who should be educated, in what manner, and for what purposes. Many of our ideas about pedagogical projects and processes have their roots in the period—for good or ill—and these same pedagogical questions drive our scholarship and vice versa. Ernest Boyer argued in 1990 for the value of the scholarship of teaching and learning: “The work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others. … knowing and learning are communal acts. … great teachers create a common ground of intellectual commitment. They stimulate active, not passive learning and encourage students to be critical, creative thinkers, with the capacity to go on learning … (Scholarship Reconsidered, 23-24).

Thirty years later, in this moment of pandemic pedagogy and cultural reckoning, our methods of delivery, curriculum, and even parameters of expertise are all under pressure. It thus seems both timely and essential to ask how we teach the long eighteenth century now. The Transits series invite expressions of interest that recognize and represent teaching as a serious scholarly activity—one that bridges the sometimes solitary and reflective work of conventional scholarship with the more communal and communicative work of teaching and learning.

Essays might consider the connections rather than the disjunctions between the work of scholarship and the work of teaching; theories of pedagogy from the long eighteenth century and their implications or revisions for our own contexts; how we teach the eighteenth century—as the period in which academic institutions were born, the period of Enlightenment and the developing idea of human rights, but also the period that institutionalized settler colonialism and slavery. Work that engages critical pedagogical practices and pragmatic approaches as a way to think about the significance of the pedagogical act (rather than say how to teach a specific work or figure), are particularly welcomed. Interdisciplinary work or work that could be adapted into multiple fields would be of particular interest. We particularly welcome essays and collection proposals from junior faculty and contingent faculty, who often find themselves on the “frontlines” of teaching. Additionally, Transits and Bucknell University Press are deeply committed to the work of equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in solidarity with the Association of University Presses and instructors and scholars of color. We warmly welcome work that explores or exemplifies inclusive teaching practices.

We welcome expressions of interest or submissions as you are able; by October 30, 2020 for fullest consideration. https://www1.bucknell.edu/script/upress/series.asp?id=33

Kate Parker, University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse (kparker@uwlax.edu) and Miriam L. Wallace, New College of Florida (mwallace@ncf.edu).

Guest blogger Jason S. Farr, of Marquette University, concludes University Press Week with his profound and personal post on disability and perception.

When I was 29, I suddenly found myself struggling to hear professors speak in the graduate seminars I attended. Conversations with friends and classmates became minefields of misunderstanding and sources of frustration. My physician referred me to an audiologist for a hearing test. She sat me in a dark booth and placed heavy headphones over my ears. Alone and filled with anxiety, I went on to fail an impossible test: somewhat discernible beeps followed by faint beeps followed by silence and the ringing oblivion of my tinnitus. The audiologist showed me the exam’s results, a line graph which plummeted at the mid-to-high frequencies. The diagnosis shocked me: I was severely hearing impaired.

The audiologist advised me to purchase behind-the-ear hearing aids but I opted for the completely-in-canal ones because they were less visible. They would require more repairs and would be uncomfortable to wear, she warned me, but I was ashamed. To have a visible indication of diminished capacity was unthinkable to me at the time. In retrospect, I wasn’t just confronting profound cognitive disorientation due to the mechanized, digital soundscapes I was learning to process; I was reconciling myself to how people reacted when they noticed the hearing aids themselves. The question that I came to dread in casual conversation was “what happened to you?” which may as well have been, “what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you able-bodied?” For a young man navigating the body-driven subculture of gay San Diego, hearing aids called attention to my disability, and disability was something I regarded as compromising the body I was building in the gym and on basketball courts. Coming out as gay seven years prior to all of this was grueling, but coming out as disabled offered an entirely new set of challenges. In many ways, claiming my disability was even more difficult than claiming my gayness because of how deeply embedded and unchecked ableism is in our social and medical systems.

In the face of all this, I continued through the PhD program in Literature at UC San Diego where I would soon become acquainted with disability studies. One of my professors, Michael Davidson, introduced me to this vibrant interdisciplinary field and, consequently, to new ways of thinking about myself and others. In disability studies, for instance, disability is conceived of as a social and cultural phenomenon, not merely a physical one. Disabled people are often regarded as defective. But by reading disability activists and scholars, I soon learned that disabled people are manifestations of biological and cultural diversity, impaired perhaps in our bodies and minds but ultimately constrained by the communities we navigate, by the systems of thought to which we are exposed, and even by language itself, which reinforces ableism with clichéd metaphors of blindness-as-ignorance, of deafness-as-obtuseness, and of crippling-as-inhibiting.

When it came time for me to write my dissertation, I turned to disability studies to help me understand how literature reimagines social and political structures. I began by writing about Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, published in 1762. Scott’s utopian novel depicts a British country estate run by variably-embodied women whose utter abhorrence of heterosexuality and patriarchy is matched in intensity only by their boundless love for each other. Curiously, all of the servants of the estate, and the inhabitants that live within the estate’s walls, are what we would today call disabled—deaf, blind, maimed, short-statured, neuroatypical, and so on. What I eventually realized was that, in writing queer and disabled bodies into her narrative, Scott imagines a social order that remedies the wrongs of her day. In Scott’s utopian reckoning, variable bodies and queer intimacy work together to reform a society that prizes freak shows and treats women as property.

The book that eventually came out of my dissertation and which was recently published with Bucknell University Press, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, is the culmination of years of research and rewriting. It argues that Scott’s novel and other fictional narratives from the eighteenth century reveal the extent to which ableism and homophobia govern social life, but it also shows that, through the disabled and queer bodies that they imagine, authors opened up new avenues of lived experience for readers from the eighteenth century forward.

Much like the fictional characters in the novels I write about, becoming disabled has enabled me to perceive myself and the world differently. It helps me to discern more acutely the plights of the people who compose the communities I inhabit. It spurs me to try to improve these communities in my own imperfect and limited ways. I don’t want to downplay the exhaustion I feel at the end of classes and office hours, after listening as attentively as possible to the ideas, questions, and concerns of students and colleagues. But I’m also motivated and energized by my impairment. Like the fictional characters of eighteenth-century novels, my body is novel, it is extraordinary, and it is rewriting the script that was designed for me. My hearing is unwieldy, to be sure, but it is also directing me toward new social landscapes whose expansive vistas I am only just beginning to perceive.

In recognition of day #4 of UP Week, two staff members tell you what it’s really like to be part of the small but dedicated team that makes up the Bucknell University Press.

Working for the Bucknell University Press has been one of my favorite parts of my college experience. We’re a small press, which means that I’ve had the opportunity to see so many parts of the process of scholarly publishing. I’ve written contracts, interviewed authors, and helped make acquisition decisions. Of course, not all of my friends entirely understand what I do. Three years in, I still have to explain to my fellow students that no, I do not work for the university newspaper; the BUP is a real press that publishes scholarly monographs. They’re usually surprised to hear Bucknell even has a university press like we do. The BUP is truly one of our campus’s hidden gems.

–Nate Freed ’21, Bucknell University Press Presidential Fellow

I originally came Bucknell for a position as the Museum Fellow at the Samek Art Museum. I had previously worked in museums and other visual arts organizations so I was new to the publishing world when I started at Bucknell University Press. I am a lifelong book lover, so it has been great to see the publishing process from start to finish. One of my favorite parts of the job is getting to look over manuscripts. I check them for formatting issues and make notes of things that authors need to correct or sometimes I correct issues myself. Once a manuscript is ready to move forward in the publishing process, getting to assign them ISBNs is exciting as well.

–Emily Owen, M.A., Bucknell University Press Editorial Assistant

Guest blog post by BUP author Tim Wenzell in recognition of University Press Week 2019

As humanism has evolved over the centuries, it has maintained and nurtured itself through empathy—having it, expressing it, and passing it on. In the humanities and literature, passing it on through the written word, through poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has functioned as a way of inducing action through reading and thinking:

*Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of rotten and contaminated meat, and the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants, shocked the public, all the way up the ladder to President Teddy Roosevelt, and led to the busting of the beef trusts and new federal food safety laws.

*Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath as a means of communicating the flawed system of growing and distribution (refusal of crop rotation crucial to the soil for profit = Dust Bowl) present in 1930s America. Political and activist movements focusing on the plight of migrant workers arose from this increased awareness from reading this important novel. Steinbeck stated that he wrote the novel with the express intention of shaming those in power responsible for the misery of the Great Depression. Steinbeck said, ”I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”

*Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and the environmental movement exploded across American consciousness, turned the light on environmental destruction for the sake of profit, and paid attention to chemicals and poison being dumped into the air and water. It was a book to which Senator Gruening remarked, “Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history.”

But can books alter history today in the same manner, or at least in the same large increments, that they did in the past? With so many books to read now, and so many ways to read them, is there not enough time left to think and act? More specifically, in the wake of Rachel Carson over half a century ago, how can we, as stewards of an environment that is rapidly collapsing on us, accomplish the task of getting the public to read, think, act?

Silent Spring was a wake-up call and frightening for sure. But do we, as would-be stewards of the environment, need to frighten in order to get the public to act? While climate change and its implications can clearly frighten, and we have been saturated by this from climatologists and ecologists, from social media to academic presses, is fear enough in the 21^st century to alter the course of history? While action is being taken to combat climate change, attention paid to these concerns has been diluted and supplanted by other threats and spectacles that take up more room in the news than a changing planet, fueling more localized fears of economic downturn, of mass shootings, of illegal immigration, among others. Because of these distractions, climate change loses its rightful place as Number One imminent threat to humanity.

This is the direction to which humanism must now gravitate: empathy toward the non-human, through an understanding that the non-human informs the human. Instead of relying solely on climatologists and ecologists delivering facts (and with them fear), another approach might be working to increase empathy. Instead of attempting to provoke thinking and action through fear of a planet turning against us by our own design, humanists are uniquely positioned to influence thought and action by teaching, writing about, and reading writers who focus on the natural world. In so doing, our students and readers may come to a more organic understanding of what is being lost. Humanists can make readers lovers of diverse cultures, but through attention to the literatures and landscapes of those cultures, rather than through fearmongering.

This was the purpose of writing and editing Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2019). Ireland is one small country on the planet, no bigger than the state of Maine, but culturally and historically it is much larger than that—and geographically, too, as one of the most naturally diverse and beautiful countries on the planet. Its geography has had an outsized influence on Irish culture, especially its literature. The anthology moves through time and nature to see, from a humanistic perspective, the relationship between Irish culture and the natural world, presenting a chronicle of voices from the early Irish monks in a forested Ireland to the voices of modern poets and naturalists who speak across a rapidly changing landscape of urban sprawl. All speak from a love of the natural world; this thread unites these writers as a culture and a people. Finally, a collection like this can inspire efforts toward the preservation of Ireland’s natural world; indeed, the anthology closes with a list of environmental organizations in Ireland.

As stewards of the environment, we need to provide more attention to nature literature everywhere, because it is everywhere. As a humanist, writing a book about nature literature that pertains to a particular geography is a way to zone in on environmental issues within that geography by displaying its cultural artifacts together in one place, chapter by chapter through time, as a testament to the living, breathing power of that natural world. Perhaps reading about the natural world will inspire action, fueled by empathy and a love of nature, rather than by fear. This direction in humanism is framed and defined by the non-human, by geography and change. The history and stories of humanity, told from particular landscapes in flux and in danger of disappearing, are vital. Without those particular landscapes, there is no humanism because there is no humanity.

Tim Wenzell

Associate Professor

Department of Humanities

Virginia Union University

Read posts from other presses in honor of UP Week 2019:

Oregon State University Press: http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/blog

University of Minnesota Press: http://uminnpressblog.com

University Press of Mississippi: https://www.upress.state.ms.us/News

Harvard University Press: https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/

University of Toronto Press: https://utorontopress.com/ca/blog