When the Modern Language Association meets this weekend in Chicago, one of the highlights of the conference will likely be the launch of the American Literatures Initiative, a joint venture between five university presses “to expand the number of books published in literary studies and increase audience reach,” funded in part by a $1.37 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “Each press will continue to acquire and develop titles according to its own needs and editorial criteria,” according to the press release, but they’ll also have “a shared, centralized, external editorial service dedicated solely to managing the production of books in the initiative.” That service will take the manuscripts through the copyediting, design, and typesetting stages up to the point when the book is ready to be delivered to a printer. They will also colloborate on “a high-profile and aggressive marketing program” to help those books, many of which will be written by debut scholars, find audiences.
The five publishers participating are New York University Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. But one of the most interesting aspects of the program, at least upon first description, is that it sounds both expandable and replicable—with that latter option having particularly interesting implications for similar (regional?) consortiums.