The Hedgehog and the Fox

This week we have an interview with Christie Henry, who’s director of Princeton University Press. She joined PUP two years ago in September 2017, after twenty-four years at the University of Chicago Press, where she was Editorial Director for Sciences, Social Sciences, and Reference Publishing. In the course of our conversation, Christie mentioned that she thought university presses had some ‘reputational work' to do. I asked her to expand on this:Christie HenrySpecific to PUP, the reputational work I feel that is important to us extends from the cultural work we're doing internally to become a more inclusive environment where we have empowered a wide range of staff in all departments to be active contributors to who we are and what our brand is. And we will be soon releasing a new website that will showcase that: telling more of our story and explaining why we think the collaborations that we have and that are entrusted to us are so powerful.I think university presses in general need to be thinking about being less reactive and less in service to universities and really being powerful forces in shaping knowledge and shaping communication. And I do think many of us do that, but in a role that is quieter, in much the way that editors play a role that is often unnoticed and subtle and very purposeful at the same time. So I think it might take us doing a little bit more public communication around the role that we're playing than we we do now – with doses of humility, of course. I think that's really important.I've been overseeing a taskforce on gender equity and cultures of respect for the AU presses, which we'll be turning over to the board this week. We, like many publishers in the UK, are struggling to reach equity along a number of axes. We have a dominance of women in positions, but not in leadership positions. We have pay inequities. (This is speaking across the university press world.) We've conducted a survey of the lived experience of the community to learn where people feel we have work to do on equities. I think that's where we can also effect some important reputational change.We can do things like look at the author demographics of our list; as proud as every publisher is of their list,there is room to grow and to adapt. I also think it's really important for us to think about ourselves as an industry and how we present to the new generation of colleagues and collaborators; we're switching from an environment that was dominated by baby boomers to one that is by millennials. And what does that mean we have to change in terms of our management style, in terms of our team dynamics?University presses, I think, I have been known to be a little bit more conservative and slow to change; going back to evolutionary terms, maybe operating in a more kind of punctuated equilibrium model. I think we need to do more punctuation and with intention, and that will help lend a currency to our reputations that we don't always have. Many of us have very storied histories, but trying to connect those histories to the here and now and also to the future impact is really important and I know a lot of my peers directors are spending a lot of time thinking about that.The post Christie Henry: ‘Shaping knowledge, shaping communication' appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Georgian London as you’ve never experienced it before: populated with animals, pullulating with animals – pigs snuffling in the dirt recycling the city’s waste; herds of sheep and cattle, thousands of them each week, being driven through the streets to and from Smithfield market; horses being used for every form of transport and playing a key part in old and new industries; barking guard dogs protecting property from prowling burglars. Londoners lived cheek by jowl with their animals: as my guest in today’s programme colourfully puts it, ‘London’s air was pungently infused with a plethora of animal smells’.My guest is Thomas Almeroth-Williams, research associate at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at York University, author of City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London (Manchester University Press, 2019) and, as it happens, a pig farmer’s son:I have to tread carefully, not least because my dad would be the first in line to point out that I'm not an expert pig farmer in the making. So I suppose my interactions were always kept at arm's length. I never showed an interest in becoming a farmer, but I did visit quite often and would go and play with the piglets. And in the book, I don't claim to to bring the expertise of a pig farmer to the book. In order to get that, I've had to use primary source material and also read animal behavioural science, etc.The key thing is that having those experiences as a farmer's son, seeing how exhausted my father was after a day's work, joining him at the farm for a day and seeing what he did, seeing what the challenges were, the hours of work, the injuries that were inflicted when a pig suddenly slipped in between your legs when you're trying to give them an injection and you fall over in the muck, that, I think, has made me more sensitive to how difficult it is to manage animals. And then I project that onto what it must have been like to manage those animals in such a difficult environment as Georgian London.Tom writes in his Preface:‘Very few historians have acknowledged the city’s animals and even fewer have integrated them into key debates in social, urban and economic history.’And that is precisely what his book does, though not, I hasten to add, in a way that is the slightest bit dry: the book is written with brio and packed with memorable anecdotes. This, for example: in 1752 Horace Walpole describes riding a few miles out of the city and enjoying ‘a syllabub under the cow’, by which he meant the cow was milked straight into a glass of cider or ale.I began our conversation by asking Tom what it would have been like to visit Georgian London for the first time.The post Thomas Almeroth-Williams: Georgian London – a city full of beasts appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, a new life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the fourteenth-century poet who is regarded as a father of English literature, though that's a stereotype my guest, Marion Turner, wants to ditch.Marion TurnerI think a lot of the ways that we think about Chaucer now are very problematic. Particularly the idea of ‘the father of English literature', which immediately makes people think he's a bit boring, that he's an old man and a patriarch, and that he's didactic. In fact, that's the opposite of what Chaucer actually was like; I think in his poetry, Chaucer is saying all the time, there is not a fixed meaning, there is not a moral. At the end of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale he says, ‘take the moralite, good men’. This is a poem which absolutely refused to give a moral, which has gone all over the place, in a dizzying array of genres. So the moral is: go and find your own moral – think for yourself. He's not a didactic poet at all. He's a poet who empowers the reader.Hedgehog & FoxAnd what about Chaucer as sober patriarch. Marion Turner wants to overturn that, too.Marion TurnerThat only comes about in the fifteenth century, after Chaucer's death. In his life, he was all kinds of different things. He was a fashionable teenager. He was a diplomat. He was someone who travelled to Spain, to Italy repeatedly. He was living on the walls of the city when the rebels flowed under the gate in 1381. He saw the deposition of the king. He travelled all around the country as well as all over Europe. He lived in a global trading environment in the city of London. He was a parent. He was a father of a daughter and sons, not the father of English literature. And I'm interested in all those different aspects of his life, which I think are not very familiar to many people today.Hedgehog & FoxFar from seeing himself as founder of the canon, the Chaucer who emerges from the pages of this biography is one who challenges the idea of authority, stability, fixity of meaning. In his dream vision, The House of Fame, the poet finds himself in the eponymous house.Marion TurnerChaucer shows us how random the canon is: authors names are etched in ice. If they're on the sunny side, they melt away. And if they're on the shaded side, they survive. But it's arbitrary and Fame herself is an arbitrary figure. So Chaucer mocks the idea of authority. Then at the very end, the Geoffrey figure comes to the House of Rumour, this chaotic, dynamic place where all kinds of stories and gossip are whirling around and ordinary people come along: pardoners, shipmen, pilgrims, who have bags full of stories. And Chaucer is really showing us that everyone has a story to tell. That it's important to listen to all kinds of different voices and that it is not enough only to read on your own in your room, just to read the old classics that people have already validated for you. You have to think for yourself.Hedgehog & FoxMarion Turner teaches English at Jesus College, Oxford. Her biography has been praised by critics as ‘carefully nuanced', ‘hugely illuminating', ‘perspicacious and often slyly humorous', ‘meticulously researched', ‘radical', ‘rich, thought-provoking and readable' and ‘magnificently scholarly'. One critic concluded, ‘this meaty new biography is likely to be the best book on the subject for decades to come'. So when I met Marion, I asked her how, having been fascinated by Chaucer for years, she decided to embark on a biography.Marion TurnerI first of all assumed that if I did a biography, it would have to be a cradle-to-grave one. And I remember sketching out the chapters and they started with the early years and they ended with the late years. And I thought, ‘I don't want to do this. This is so boring. I can't see how I can make this different.' And I actually went for a walk. It sounds like such a cliché, but I did. I went for a walk around the meadows, around Christchurch Meadow here in Oxford. And I walked around and thought about it. And I did have a road to Damascus moment where I decided that I would try to do this biography and I would do it through places and spaces. And for me, that completely transformed the idea of doing it because what I realized was that if I approach Chaucer’s life through spaces and places, I could make this a biography of the imagination, I could be more flexible in how I cut across his life. So although the biography is roughly chronological, it's in three sections that move roughly through sections of his life because I am interested in the development of his imagination across time. But at the same time, I often want to follow strands that are not strictly bound by chronology and by thinking about spaces and places, I could really focus on what he saw, what kind of structures he lived in, and how that affected his sense of his own identity and his audience's sense of their identities, what his metaphors actually meant in terms of the material objects that he saw with which he was familiar.And so for me, that was a really productive way of approaching biography. And the places are varying. Some of them are actual places such as Genoa and Florence, or Reims and Calais or Navarre, places that he went to. Some of them are structures. So things like the great household, which doesn't exist in the same way today and really lets us think about the public and the private life. And some are more abstract still: the cage, the Milky Way, peripheries, places that he talks about perhaps metaphorically or that he speculates about. So that structure allowed me to look at a range of different aspects of his life and also helped me to crystallize in my mind that I wasn't going to try to make this a biography of the emotional life. When you're writing about someone for whom you do not have private letters, diaries, memoirs, and you can't interview their grandchildren, I don't think you can get at that private, emotional life the way that you can from more recent subject. But I think you can get it their imagination. And that was what I wanted to focus on.The post Marion Turner on Chaucer: A European Life appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we have the director’s cut of an interview with Caroline Priday, who’s Global Promotions Director for Princeton University Press, and head of their European office in Woodstock, near Oxford. (Extracts from this interview featured in the podcast marking Princeton’s European office’s 20th birthday recently and longer interviews with other participants in that programme will appear in the next few months, including an extensive interview with the Press’s director, Christie Henry.)When I spoke to Caroline in Woodstock a few weeks ago, I was interested to ask her about how promoting academic books had changes since she began; whether her heart sinks when an author insists they ‘don't do social media'; and why the PUP Europe office is a good place to experiment. Oh, and the episode also contains a bottle of sherry and some glam rock, but you'll have to listen to find out why.Caroline started her publishing career in 1979 as a secretary to two academic marketing managers at Oxford University Press. There followed a fifteen-year stint at Elsevier and two years working for a book distributor in Singapore. And then, fourteen years ago, she was back in the UK and living in Woodstock when she heard about an opening at Princeton University Press…The post Caroline Priday on promoting university press books appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we ask, are Britain and France still trapped in their own myth-making about their colonial pasts? My guest on the programme is Robert Gildea, who is professor… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s programme is rather unusual: it has six guests rather than one. To mark the twentieth birthday of Princeton University Press‘s European office in Woodstock, near Oxford, I spoke… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week the Hedgehog and the Fox explore four centuries in the afterlife of Joan of Arc. Our guest, Gail Orgelfinger, is a medievalist by training and a founding member… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, another in our series of Conversations with Translators. And with my guest Tim Allen, we move for the first time (at last) beyond European languages. I’m always interested… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, the Hedgehog and the Fox explore the benefits of speaking more than one language in the company of science writer Marek Kohn. Marek has recently published a book… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, the Hedgehog and the Fox investigate the origins of human musicality by looking for musical ability and perception in other animals, including rhesus macaques, zebra finches, a cockatoo… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.