Get Ready for University Press Week 2025!
Next week, November 10-14
In this week’s newsletter
University Press Week Nov 10-14
Singapore Writer’s Festival Nov 7-16
Democratic Dialogues from Cornell University’s Brooks Center on Global Democracy
Fast Five with archaeologist Joe Watkins
University Press Week Nov 10-14
The Association of University Presses is holding its 14th annual celebration of the global university press publishing community from November 10-14! This fun-filled week spotlights the organization of 168 mission-driven publishers, 69 books and journals, and 13 initiatives that embody this year’s theme of #TeamUP! Learn more here!
Events will be held in New York, Boston, Seattle, Montreal, Barcelona, London and more. Among the exciting events happening during UPW is a panel on Nov. 13 at the British Library in London that will celebrate Jane Austen. Two Boston events will examine the challenges and opportunities posed by AI. Check out the full list to find events in your city here!
Tune in to this year’s conversation with Dennis Lloyd, AUPresses President and Director at the University of Wisconsin Press.
Singapore Writer’s Festival Nov 7-16
The Singapore Writers Festival will take place November 7-16! SWF started in 1986 and has become one of Asia’s premier literary events as a vibrant gathering for writers, academics, and thinkers, offering panel discussions, workshops, lectures, and performances.
This year’s theme is “Shape of Things to Come,” inspired by H.G. Wells’ sci-fi novel. Events include lectures, readings and intimate salons to large-scale performances and cross-disciplinary collaborations. SWF will feature over 200 programs in English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil, accompanied by live translations for key sessions. SWF is one of the few multi-lingual literary festivals in the world, celebrating the written and spoken word in Singapore’s official languages. Check out the full schedule here!
Along with programs, visit the Festival Bookstore on the second floor of The Arts House at the Old Parliament. You can find books by featured authors and speakers, as well as book signings! The Festival Bookstore is partnered with Closetful of Books, a roaming bookstore that specializes in children’s literature.
Can’t make it to Singapore Writer’s Festival in person? Listen to a few of our great interviews with scholars of Singapore below!
Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool UP, 2024) draws from a body of Anglophone and multilingual cultural texts created in contemporary Singapore and in its diasporic communities. From banned documentaries to award-winning graphic novels, flash fiction collections to conceptual art, there is a vibrant, growing body of transmedial, multi-genre resistance to an overmapped, hyper-planned, and ecologically destructive postcolonial development.
The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory (National University of Singapore Press, 2022) by Dr. Kevin Blackburn details the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore. Dr. Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore’s memory: newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000.
Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (University of Washington Press, 2025), an ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Dr. Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled “Protestant” Buddhism.
Democratic Dialogues
We are excited to share a new Special Series on the NBN!
Democratic Dialogues is a podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy co-hosted by Rachel Beatty Riedl, Esam Boraey, and Maya Tudor. This show is about bringing cutting-edge research on democracy to you, citizens who will shape the future of democratic governance.
Each episode digs into new books and research and ask what they mean for the challenges democracies currently face, and the potential and opportunities for democracy to deepen, evolve, and contribute to citizens’ thriving.
Listen to the first episode below, and check out the Democratic Dialogues page on our website to catch all episodes as they’re published!
If you represent an academic institution, foundation, or think tank and are interested in learning more about NBN’s professional podcasting services, please fill out this form and email us.
Fast Five: Joe Watkins
Joe Watkins is a senior consultant with ACE Consultants, a Visiting Professor in the Global Station for Indigenous Studies and Cultural Diversity at Hokkaido University, and a Designated Campus Colleague in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. His new book Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future (University of Arizona Press, 2025), provides a comprehensive look at the rich history and cultural resilience of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan, tracing their journey from ancient times to their contemporary struggles for recognition.
Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto by Vine Deloria - This book is a classic for those interested in American Indian issues in America. Written in 1969 at the mid-point of the Red Power Movement, the establishment of the American Indian Movement, and the forthright exclamation that “We are still here!”, this book is a must read for anyone who did not live in that period of time and is curious about how American Indian sovereignty has developed and played out over the last 50 plus years. This wasn’t my “Bible;” it was more important than that.
Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Robert Heinlein - This is one of the few books I will pick up at a moment’s notice and read to the end in one sitting. The first time I read it I was probably ten or eleven, and I let myself float away into the vast realm that was space as it was known at that time. The deliberations on the fate of the human race (and the placement of the Neanderthal) was something I remembered vividly as I learned about human evolutional thought as a college student. I remember reading it in one evening in Dallas before a comprehensive exam as a way of alleviating the stress of graduate school.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams - This is my favorite part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is another book I can read and reread. I find subtle things with each reading that make me appreciate the idea that life as we live it is often as comedic as Douglas Adams appears to see it.
Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo - Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s life story, as she presents it bathed in tribal mystery and through the perspectives of a warrior always makes me stop and think about how slovenly my writing is, and how indistinct I see the pathways of my own life. I love the book and will pick it up at times when I seem confused or when I catch myself wondering how I got to be who and where I currently am. I yearn to tell my story in as profound a way that Joy tells hers.
Shōgun by James Clavell - This book set the impetus for me to travel to Japan, even though at the time I first read it I knew I’d never get there. The book is a fictional story of the time of initial European contact with Japan, and it offered me a glimpse of a world beyond central Oklahoma. It instilled in me a goal that took 30 years to accomplish, but the time I have spent in Japan (mostly Hokkaido) since my first trip in 2007 has reinforced that dream of 50 years ago.
Put Joe’s recs on your To Be Read list, and listen to his great interview about Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future.
