Humanities Highlights of 2018

Victoria Peters and Felicity Plester are the Editorial Directors for the Humanities at Palgrave Macmillan.

2018 has been another wonderful year for Palgrave Humanities! We have published almost 800 new titles to serve the academic humanities community globally, including a wide range of comprehensive and innovative titles in our Palgrave Handbooks series – from The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema to The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History as well as our first ever Humanities Major Reference Work The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, edited by Jeremy Tambling.

Our runaway success of the year has been Dale Salwak’s Writers and their Mothers, featuring essays from household names such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Margaret Drabble and Andrew Motion to name but a few, which has been reviewed in almost every mainstream news outlet imaginable and was even named Guardian Book of the Week! Other attention-grabbing highlights of 2018 were Taner Akçam’s Killing Orders tackling the difficult subject of the Armernian genocide, Lucy Neville’s Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, Podcasting edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox and Richard Berry, Trump’s Media War edited by Catherine Happer, Andrew Hoskins and William Merrin. We are also adding some books for higher level students to our mix and to support your teaching, such a Naomi Zack’s Philosophy of Race: An Introduction. Added to that we published another cluster of Open Access titles this year, highlighting our commitment to this model – we are always keen to see more OA proposals in any of our subject areas – see here.

And we are very proud to have picked up some impressive prizes along the way, including the 2018 Canadian Oral History Association Prize, which was awarded to Oral History and Education. Also Liberation Technology in El Salvador by Summer Harlow, which won the 2018 AEJMC Knudson Latin America Prize, Sex and Sensibility in the Novels of Alan Hollinghurst was awarded the BACLS Edited Collection Prize, Vincent Ferrer, His World and Life (published in The New Middle Ages series) won the 2018 La corónica Book Award for the best monograph published on Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean was the winner of the 2018 Japanese Association for African Studies 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 animation, fashion, gaming, contemporary women’s writing, American studies, modernism, and those fascinating points where the humanities cross into science…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 (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) publishing workshop we ran for early career researchers, or our Palgrave commissioning surgeries that ran in our London offices earlier in the year as part of Academic Book Week, as well as our first ever ‘Open House’ event ran by our team of editors in our New York office. Our Campaign for the Humanities continues to go from strength to strength and we're very proud to once again be part of the Being Human Festival (run by the School of Advanced Study at University of London) hosting an exciting session on Humans Designing Humans, featuring a cross-disciplinary group of our own authors exploring ‘designer babies’, genetic editing and the dangers of creating a master race in a stimulating discussion of what it means to be human at a time when creating human life no longer means what it once did.

Victoria Peters and Felicity Plester, Editorial Directors, Humanities