The History of Text Technologies program joined with the global academic publisher Palgrave to create a new book history series, which will be launched with three new books in late 2009 or 2010. Gary Taylor (HoTT Director) will be General Editor of the series, with an editorial board that also includes HoTT faculty François Dupuigrenet-Desrousilles and Anne Coldiron. We welcome book proposals and completed manuscripts. Unlike some other academic presses, Palgrave has an excellent record of producing books in a timely fashion, and we are committed to getting works to readers as quickly as possible.
The HoTT series will invite important new humanities scholarship informed by traditional book history. This will include work that derives from material and analytic bibliography, paleography and epigraphy, history of authorship, history of reading, study of manuscript and print culture, history of media, but our focus will be on scholarship that takes that more familiar knowledge in new direction and applies it in new ways. The initial historic framework for the series will be pre-modern texts: volumes in the series might include work on such topics as medieval illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance cartography, the transmissions and translations of Arabic texts up through Andalusia of the Spanish convivencia into early modern universities, the silk roads of the late medieval book trade, or the travels of the book in colonial New Spain. This historic focus would not, however, be a turn to the past. Rather, we would seek out scholarship that provides a frame for understanding the consequences of both globalism and technology in the circulation of texts, ideas, and human culture. Moreover, we are equally interested in the ways that post-modern digital and multi-media technologies are transforming our understanding of pre-modern textual culture.
For more information and a longer discussion on the philosophy of the HoTT Book Series, please see our editorial statement.