Editing

I am Series Editor of the University of Iowa Press series The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, which I founded with Iowa editor Joseph Parsons in 2012. The series has seen thirty-one books to publication, books that continue to contribute to scholarship on the contemporary and that even get read by civilians. Highlights include books on:

• contemporary American literature and the writing program, such as Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War and Loren Glass’s edited collection, After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University
• important writers, such as David Foster Wallace (Lee Konstantinou and my The Legacy of David Foster Wallace), Dennis Cooper (Diarmuid Hester’s Wrong), and William Gibson (Mitch Murray and Mathias Nilges’ William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture)
• music and sound, including Tim Gray’s It’s Just the Normal Noises: Marcus, Guralnick, No Depression, and the Mystery of Americana Music, Nicole Furlonge’s Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature, and Gina Arnold’s Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella
• place in American literature, such as Lowell Wyse’s Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature, Kathy Knapp’s American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11, Keith Whilhite’s Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and U.S. Regionalism, 1945-2020, and Jim Cocoloa’s Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry
• war fiction, including David Eisler’s Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, World War I to Present and John K. Young’s How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production
• American literature in global context, such as Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith’s Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War and David Higgins’s Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood
• literature and social change such as Sean Grattan’s Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature and Teresa Longo’s Visible Dissent: Latin American Writers, Small U.S. Presses, and Progressive Social Change.

I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to talk and write about scholarly publishing and editing in a variety of contexts in the last few years. I have taken part in a number of workshops, panels, and roundtables (many of which I’ve organized) on academic writing and scholarly editing and publishing at the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association and the Midwest Modern Language Association.  I gave a talk, “The Higher Learning & The Bottom Line: The Changing Fortunes of Universities and Their Presses,” at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, which became an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review and was the seed for a book I’m now writing on the history of American university presses.