Princeton University Press is thrilled to be co-sponsoring, along with Princeton University’s Fung Fellows Program and the International Comparative Literature Association, Global Publishing and the Making of Literary Worlds: Translation, Media, and Mobility.
The three-day virtual conference, running from June 4–6, is designed to serve as a resource for early career scholars and authors—pre-tenured faculty, post-docs, and senior graduate students writing or revising a thesis or book for publication. Engaging issues of social inequities, systemic racism, xenophobia, economic crises, and pandemic, the conference encourages participants to look to the future and “imagine the books we will most want to read—and write.”
Balancing discussion of comparative and world literatures with practical workshops led by publishing professionals, on topics such as peer review, article writing, and publishing in translation, conference programming aims to foster transparency about the state of contemporary global publishing for aspiring authors seeking eventual publication with academic and/or trade presses. Editors from across the publishing community have also offered one-on-one mentoring sessions with each registrant, taking place throughout the global gathering.
Several PUP staff members, as well as authors and translators, will lead conference programming. Princeton University Press Director Christie Henry will chair a keynote panel on International Publishing, with Parneshia Jones, Director of Northwestern University Press; Naveen Kishore, Founder and Managing Director of Seagull Books; Elias Wondimu, Founding Director of TSEHAI Publishers; and Michael Reynolds, Editor in Chief of Europa Editions.
Ines ter Horst, PUP’s Director of Contracts, Rights, and Permissions, will chair a keynote panel on The Marketplace of Translations: From Bookfairs to Bookstores, with Will Evans, Executive Director and Publisher of Deep Vellum; author and translator Lawrence Schimel; and poet and translator Liliana Valenzuela.
Executive Editor Anne Savarese will chair a keynote panel on Publishing in Translation, with Judith Gurewich, Publisher of Other Press; Will Evans; Robyn Cresswell, a translator of literary works in French and Arabic, and author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (PUP); and Shelley Frisch, an award-winning translator of German literature who has translated several PUP books, including Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography of Franz Kafka and, most recently, Billy Wilder on Assignment: Notes from Weimer Berlin and Interwar Vienna, edited by Noah Isenberg.
William Germano, co-author of Syllabus: The Remarkable Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything, will lead a workshop on scholarly writing, “Making the World Legible.” Wendy Belcher, co-editor and co-translator of The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth Century Biography of an Ethiopian Woman and The Life of Walatta-Petros: A Seventeenth-Century Biography of an African Woman, Concise Edition (both PUP) will lead a plenary workshop on “How to Write an Article.”
Select conference programming will be recorded and shared after events have concluded. Please visit https://globalpublishing.princeton.edu/program to access the full program.