University Press lauded for innovation

Round-up of publishers across country includes Colorado nonprofit

The University Press of Colorado recently was featured in "The 17 most innovative university presses," an article posted at the Huffington Post.

University Press is a nonprofit cooperative enterprise supported in part by a consortium of eight Colorado public universities, including CU. Three CU faculty members and one administrator sit on its board of trustees; Kathleen Bollard, associate vice president and academic affairs officer, was elected chair last year.

"For whatever shortsighted reasons, newspapers and mainstream media in general give short shrift to the vast output of our great university presses," writes Anis Shivani. "The misimpression should be removed: university presses do not publish boring or excessively weighty or arcane books. They may not be into showmanship and high-stakes publicity maneuvers, but their steady, unrelenting focus on particular subject areas creates vast bodies of new knowledge that the mainstream reviewing community makes a great mistake in ignoring."

In his comments for the article, Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press, says it is "dedicated to publishing cutting-edge, significant scholarship in the fields of archaeology, history, and natural history. As an institution, we are committed to our authors and ensuring that they have a very pleasant publishing experience with UPC, and we also take pride in being a good place to work.

"Recently, we took the lead on a very exciting collaboration among six university presses, called the Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative, to help guide our transition into a digital publishing environment."

Recent titles that Pratt mentioned: Anthony Aveni's The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012; Crossroads of Culture: Anthropology Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science; and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi's Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens.

Upcoming titles include: Ethelia Ruiz Medran's Mexico's Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010; Helen Haines and Clare Sammells's Adventures in Eating: Anthropological Experiences in Dining From Around the World; David Robertson's Hard as the Rock Itself: Place and Identity in the American Mining Town; and Sarah Lyon's Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair-Trade Markets.