A letter from the Editors: Victoria Peters and Felicity Plester
Author: Guest contributor
Victoria Peters and Felicity Plester are the Editorial Directors for the Humanities at Palgrave Macmillan.
What a busy and productive year we have had in Palgrave Humanities! We have published several hundred new titles to serve the academic humanities community globally, including a wide range of comprehensive and innovative titles in our Palgrave Handbooks series – from Jeremy Tambling’s
Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, to Melanie Ilic’s
Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union, and our first ever Handbook on our theatre studies list -
The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers, edited by Laura MacDonald and William Everett. We have reinforced our position as publisher of primary texts by key philosophers, with a new collection of the texts of Foucault’s lectures (Foucault,
Subjectivity and Truth) and the highly reviewed
To Be Born by Luce Irigaray. Other attention-grabbing highlights of 2017 were Sexton’s
Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing and
Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, edited by Renton and Gidley.
And we are very proud to have picked up some impressive prizes along the way, having won Children’s Literature Association Book Award with Clare Bradford’s
The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature. To name a few others – and there are many - Bolton & Wright (eds.),
Lasting Screen Stars won Best Edited Collection at BAFTSS; Royona Mitra’s book
Akram Khan won the first-ever Dance Studies Association first book award;
Romantics: A chronology won CILIP Knowledge and information Management Group Information Resources (Print) Award 2017; Kuukaanen’s
Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiographywas awarded the 2016 ICHTH Book Prize for Historical Theory and Historiography; Alison Stone’s
The Value of Popular Music received the 2017 Outstanding Publication Award from the Popular Music Interest Group, and Tomás Irish’s
The University at War, 1914-25 won the History of Education Society’s Kevin Brehony Prize.
We have very well established lists across the range of history, literature, philosophy, film, media and cultural studies and theatre and performance studies, carefully shaped and curated by dedicated editors, with the help of many brilliant series editors, over the years. We are always keen to hear about new ideas and projects in any of those subjects. Our editors are constantly creating new series and clusters of new titles in emerging areas, especially those that are at the intersections of disciplines within the humanities and beyond – for example we are working on signing new titles in literary animal studies, animal ethics, music and literature, Wittgenstein studies, gaming studies, visual culture and applied theatre…so expect to see more from us in those areas and more over the next couple of years.
You may have seen us at some of the many academic conferences we have attended during the year all over the world or come to one of our events, like the TORCH (Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities) publishing workshop we ran for early career researchers, or our Palgrave commissioning surgery ran in our own building in London earlier in the year as part of Academic Book Week. We also run our Campaign for the Humanities, and are proud to be part once again of the Being Human Festival (run by the School of Advanced Study at University of London) hosting an exciting session on Voices Lost and Found, featuring a cross-disciplinary group of our own authors speaking on a range of themes relating the 50 year anniversary of the Decriminalization of Homosexuality in the United Kingdom.
