The University of Michigan Press and the Ann Arbor District Library’s Fifth Avenue Press are excited to announce that our recent book Cinema Ann Arbor: How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular Film Culture by Frank Uhle is one of five books that have been included in the Alice Award Short List from Furthermore grants in publishing, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. Ann Arbor, long known for its political and cultural activism, has an equally compelling history of engagement with film and media. Delving into almost 100 years of rarely glimpsed history, Cinema Ann Arbor melds interviews, deep archi ..read more

  July is Disability Pride Month! Beginning with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, Disability Pride Month celebrates the identities and legacies of disabled people while also highlighting past and present prejudices and injustices towards them. The University of Michigan Press offers a variety of books to explore disability, including studies in areas such as the arts and history that make you question the very concept of “disability”, as well as interviews, poems, and memoirs from disabled people themselves. This month, we invite you to celebrate Disabili ..read more

This guest author post is a Q&A with Shannon Steen, author of The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea, from the University of Michigan Press. The book is available in hardcover, paper, and accessible ebook. What initially inspired you to explore the concept of creativity and its change in definition across time? I had two things happen at roughly the same time, both of which I talk about in the book. The first was that my home department (I teach in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley) was undergoing the accreditation review process, and in trying ..read more

This guest author post is written by Luke Munn, author of Technical Territories: Data, Subjects, and Spaces in Infrastructural Asia, from the University of Michigan Press, soon to be available in hardcover and open access. Street crowd reflecting in the polyhedral mirrors of Tokyu Plaza Omotesando, Harajuku Station, Tokyo, Japan, a sunny Sunday afternoon. Designed by architect Hiroshi Nakamura. CC-BY-SA Basile Morin As the figure strides into the frame, the algorithm goes to work, latching on to the tell-tale configuration of eyes, nose, and mouth that signals a human face. It draws a pixelat ..read more

Here at the University of Michigan Press, we pride ourselves on texts that are educational, accessible, and interesting. It’s important to us that those texts make their way into students’ and teachers’ hands. Our books are meant to be read and discussed in academic settings, and instructors putting those books onto their syllabi makes that happen. Below is just a small selection of our course adoptable titles from a wide array of subject areas. These books have already been widely used in syllabi across the country.    American Studies Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black ..read more

About the 2023 Tobin Siebers Prize Submissions are now open for the 2023 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. The prize is awarded in memory of disability studies pioneer Tobin Siebers, Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of many influential books and articles in the field of Disability Studies. The prize is awarded yearly for the best proposed book-length manuscript on a topic of pressing urgency in the field (with the exception of 2020, due to the challenges presented by COVID-19). Reflecting on the work of the scholar the prize commemorate ..read more

This guest author post is written by Arum Park, author of Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus, from the University of Michigan Press, soon to be available in hardcover and open access. One of the conventions of ancient Greek poetry is that the poet often opens his work with an invocation to a deity. For example, the earliest Greek poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, start this way: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος (Iliad 1.1) Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus. ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον (Odyssey 1.1) Tell me, Muse, about the man of many turns. Such in ..read more

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which is a celebration and acknowledgement of the cultural and historical impacts of these important groups and their members. AAPI month was first recognized in the US in 1978, and since then has become a time to honor Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. You can learn more about it here, and for those lucky enough to be in Ann Arbor, you can attend some AAPI month events. From Japanese video games to the ecology of the Pacific, the University of Michigan Press is highlighting some of our most relevant titles. During the month of M ..read more

This guest author post is a Q&A with Ben Whaley, author of Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games, from the University of Michigan Press. The book is Volume 100 in the Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies and is available in hardcover, paper, and accessible ebook. What originally interested you in Japanese video games? I have played video games ever since I was young and owned most of the major home console systems. However, growing up, I am not sure that I associated many of the Nintendo, Sega, and Sony games I played with Japan per se. One ..read more

April is National Poetry Month! Poets do the important work of translating the busy and confusing world around us into something magical and transcendent. Their work is too often dismissed as impractical or confusing. But poets want to be heard, and writing is meant to be read — and there’s no better time to highlight that than this month, which aims to make poetry accessible and exciting to all. These UMP titles are a great place to start. Our collection of books by and about poets will jumpstart your reading this month and make poetry something to celebrate!  Organized with guiding word ..read more