PUBLIC BOOKS Preview Coming Soon!
22 September 2011
This fall Public Culture will launch a preview of Public Books, a new web-exclusive section devoted to real-time debate about serious non-fiction books, literary fiction, and emergent cultural trends as evidenced in current media and the arts, including digital arts. Contributors will be drawn from the international network of both well-established and younger scholars associated with Public Culture and the Institute for Public Knowledge, as well as from an array of artists, filmmakers, critics, activists, and other public intellectuals working outside the academy. In addition to monthly review essays with robust comment functionality, we expect to feature book-related reflections on current events, interviews with authors, and video and audio of lectures and readings, all on a new dedicated forum at www.publicbooks.org.
Public Books will be under the direction of three wonderfully dynamic scholars and true public intellectuals from the generation now rising to prominence in the academy: Caitlin Zaloom, Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University; John L. Jackson, University Professor of Communication and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and an award-winning documentary filmmaker; and Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor of English at Columbia University.
Zaloom is a wide-ranging scholar of culture and economy. She is the author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (University of Chicago Press) as well as numerous book chapters and articles on subjects from the social life of urban economies to the emerging field of neuroeconomics and the emotional character of financial markets. Her research on traders and technology has been featured in the New York Times and on the BBC.
Jackson is a versatile, award-winning scholar, whose specialties include race, religion, globalization, media, cities, and politics. He is the author of three books, Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press), Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press), and Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (Basic). As a filmmaker, Jackson has produced documentaries, a feature-length fiction film, and short films that have screened at film festivals internationally.
Marcus is a prominent author and academic whose interests bridge literature and history, urban and architectural studies, and feminist and queer theory. She is the author of the prize-winning Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton) and Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press). Marcus’s current work examines Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and the nineteenth-century culture of theatrical celebrity.
As part of a broader initiative under new editor Eric Klinenberg to update Public Culture’s mission and extend its reach, Public Books aims both to bring the best writing from the academy to a wider audience and to encourage informed critical debate on influential interdisciplinary books from trade publishers. The full launch of Public Books is scheduled to coincide with the release of the Winter 2012 issue, the first completely under the direction of Klinenberg and his new Editorial Committee.
For more information write to us at books@publicculture.org.