THE QUESTION
What would academe look like without the university press?

What would academe look like without the university press?

Sharon Ryan | Friday, January 29, 2016

THE QUESTION (2015-2016) is devoted to a celebration of the arts and humanities. In this issue, we focus on the West Virginia University Press. Several staff members at the WVU Press share with us their thoughts about the essential role a university press plays in the intellectual and cultural life of a university and society. A university press specializes in the publication of carefully researched, dutifully edited, peer-reviewed work that provides us with reliable sources that help us understand our world. What would academe be like without the university press? What would we know without a university press? As always, the blog (scroll way down to the very bottom) is open for you to share your own ideas. THE QUESTION promotes a vibrant intellectual culture at WVU that encourages learning, exploration, and inquiry.

Please check out the links below for some exciting opportunities at the WVU Press. You can weigh in on a book cover contest for West Virginia poet laureate, Marc Harshman's newest book. Just follow the link, choose your favorite, and cast your vote. And, if you are a graduate student interested in learning about how to get your work published, on February 18, from 9am-11am, the WVU Press is hosting a panel of experts to help you. Click the link below for details.

Derek Krissoff,  Director

In short, university presses are a key part of the academic landscape, and without them scholarship would be much poorer. We’d have far fewer books and journals about important but sometimes specialized subject matter, and scholarly work that did appear (through, say, posting directly to the web) would lack the peer review, editing, design, and marketing that university presses specialize in.

Read the Essay
Abby Freeland,  Sales and Marketing Director

The books that university presses publish connect us to each other in the present, yet they also help us remember the past and look toward the future. With that mission, the university press is the university’s partner. It makes the invaluable work accomplished within the academy visible and accessible outside its own walls.


Read The Essay
Jason Gosnell,  Managing Editor

Academe would suffer greatly without the existence of university presses because we provide many useful scholarly resources in the form of academic manuscripts and academic journals, which help a range of individuals perform scholarly research—from freshmen writing a research paper, to grad students writing theses and dissertations and professors establishing tenure. Without the robust reviewing and fact-checking of information that academic publishers provide, the quality of information provided to scholars would also decline.


Read the Essay
Than Saffel, Art Director and Production Manager

Unlike trade publishers, university presses have the luxury—and perhaps a mandate—to stake a claim to obscure but fascinating corners of culture, artistic and otherwise. By so doing, we enrich the academy and the wider marketplace of ideas.

Read the Essay
WVU Press Home

WVU PRESS

Help pick the cover of a WVU Press book

Pick Cover

Scholarly publishing panel for all graduate students

Publishing Panel