Wednesday 10 September 2014

Jill Liddington Book Events

Jill Liddington, author of Vanishing for the Vote, has a number of book events coming up. Please see the below poster for more details.

Vanishing for the vote recounts what happened on one night, Sunday 2 April, 1911, when the Liberal government demanded every household comply with its census requirements. Suffragette organisations urged women, all still voteless, to boycott this census.

Many did. Some wrote ‘Votes for Women’ boldly across their schedules. Others hid in darkened houses or, in the case of Emily Wilding Davison, in a cupboard within the Houses of Parliament. 

Yet many did not. Even some suffragettes who might be expected to boycott decided to comply – and completed a perfectly accurate schedule. Why?

Vanishing for the vote explores the ‘battle for the census’ arguments that raged across Edwardian England in spring 1911. It investigates why some committed campaigners decided against civil disobedience tactics, instead opting to provide the government with accurate data for its health and welfare reforms.

This book plunges the reader into the turbulent world of Edwardian politics, so vividly recorded on census night 1911. Based on a wealth of brand-new documentary evidence, it offers compelling reading for history scholars and general readers alike.

Sumptuously produced, with 50 illustrations and an invaluable Gazetteer of suffrage campaigners.



Monday 8 September 2014

Professor Jackie Stacey in conversation with Dr Frances Pinter, CEO, MUP – On Interdisciplinarity


Jackie Stacey is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester where she is currently Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts and Languages (CIDRAL). Her publications include: Star Gazing: Female Spectators and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) and The Cinematic Life of the Gene. (2010).  She has also co-edited a number of books, including most recently: Queer Screens with Sarah Street (2007) and Writing Otherwise: Experiments in Cultural Criticism with Janet Wolff (2013). She has been a co-editor of Screen since 1994.

FP: As you know, Manchester University Press has an excellent reputation for in-depth scholarly monographs. When we met last year I told you that I was keen to strengthen MUP’s contribution to interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship. Is this something you’d encourage us to do?

JS: Absolutely. Maybe you could even set up a series that champions interdisciplinary projects. There is a real need for innovation in this area in the current climate, which is in danger of being too defined by REF anxieties about disciplinary conformity. I’d like to see much more interdisciplinary work, which inspires academic writing to take risks and be more imaginative. 

FP: How would you define an interdisciplinary book in the humanities or social sciences?

JS: For me, it would be a book produced from a particular kind of thinking across conventional academic boundaries – one that could not have been conceptualized from within the traditions of one field.  Some of the most interesting interdisciplinary work, I think, sits in between the humanities and the social sciences, perhaps combining usually incommensurate scales or registers: for example, the economic and the textual, or the empirical and the poetic. Usually, these books help us think across several fields (rather than just combining two) and they often unsettle our world views, leaving us in a new place that might reframe our research focus. Sometimes, though not always, the best interdisciplinary writing has a strong conceptual mission that literally picks us up and puts us down somewhere we had not already quite imagined through our existing academic frameworks.

FP: We’ve published specialist books that are read by more than the core audience to which it is directed. Would you call these interdisciplinary?

JS: Not exactly, no. I think there’s a crucial distinction between books, which speak to more than one discipline, and perhaps would be of interest to people beyond their disciplinary focus (for example, the work of a cultural historian might be read by literary critics working on a similar topic) and books, which are interdisciplinary in aim and scope. Often, the latter seek to mark out new spaces through which to approach intellectual questions, rather than just combining two existing approaches.

FP: Bookshops, libraries and online databases all seem to still rely on the old discipline distinctions. Do you have any recommendations as to how we should let people know about any truly interdisciplinary works?

JS: Good question. I wish I had a single brilliant suggestion to remedy this but I suspect it’s a more complex challenge, which would involve a series of intersecting interventions by some kind of alliance between publishers, academics and librarians committed to promoting interdisciplinary research. And it would be great if the AHRC, the ESRC and indeed the REF panels were all asked to set out some new proposals of how to address the continuing problems of ruling interdisciplinary work out of the main frame.

FP: The Academy is still pretty much defined by well-established disciplines. What advice would you give young scholars who want to approach important issues via truly interdisciplinary means? Will this help or harm their future prospects?

JS: Well, it’d be easy just to say that there are plenty of highly successful academics whose careers have been built on interdisciplinary work; and we could claim that many of the most influential thinkers who have shaped our intellectual landscapes today have been interdisciplinary in their worldviews (think of Marx, Freud and Foucault, for example, or think of Spivak, Hall, Haraway and Butler). But I wouldn’t want to suggest to young scholars that there are not real barriers and risks involved in not being intelligible to a disciplinary appointment committee or a funding council. I suppose in the end, the necessary skill to develop if you want to pursue an interdisciplinary research career is one which ensures your work translates relatively clearly into a number of more disciplinary fields. In this sense, it’s a question of knowing your audience and being able and willing to invite them into your way of thinking that is sufficiently interesting, and most importantly perhaps, rigorous, to engage them successfully in your intellectual project. 

Tuesday 2 September 2014



MUP’s CEO, Dr. Frances Pinter is also the founder of Knowledge Unlatched and was recently in Lyon to accept the IFLA/Brill Award for Open Access 2014 at the International Federation of Library Association’s annual congress.


Knowledge Unlatched was chosen as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field in 2014. The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons license via OAPEN and HathiTrust. The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines.

The jury of the IFLA/Brill award stated that they were ‘deeply impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the original concept, with the daring scope of the project, bringing together libraries, publishers and other organizations from around the world, and with the highly successful outcome of the pilot phase that tested the concept’. Read the full press release here

MUP was one of the 13 distinguished university presses and academic publishing houses from the UK, Europe and the USA that participated in the pilot with the book, Making and unmaking in early modern English drama by Chloe Porter.