News and Events

Congratulations to William C. Dowling, recipient of the 2012 Robert Maynard Hutchins Award for his protection of academic priority and ongoing efforts to move Rutgers to a participatory model of intercollegiate athletics. Dr. Dowling is the author of Confessions of a Spoilsport.

Penn State Press author Alan Sack, author of Counterfeit Amateurs, reflects on the controversy surrounding the Penn State football program on the New York Times website: http://tiny.cc/nw5gj

The Pennsylvania State University Press announces Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translation of Jean Racine’s Fratricides has won a 2011 American Book Award.

Established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation, The American Book Awards are given in “recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community.” Recent winners include Dave Eggers, Suheir Hammad, and Amiri Baraka.

Fratricides is the first volume of a planned translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays, a project undertaken only three times in the three centuries since Racine’s death, and the first to render the plays in rhymed “heroic” couplets. Argent has also completed volumes two and three, Bajazet and Iphigenia; the fourth, Athaliah, will be released in spring 2012.

The awards will be presented on October 16, 2011, at the University of California Alumni House in Berkeley, California.

Penn State University Press is pleased to announce a new Series Editor and Advisory Board for its Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies Series. The series will move forward under the direction of Jesús Escobar (Northwestern). Distinguished members of the Advisory Board include, Cammy Brothers (University of Virginia), David Friedman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Diane Ghirardo (University of Southern California), and Volker Welter (University of California-Santa Barbara). Successful manuscript proposals for this series will seek to negotiate the relationship between the constructed world and expressions of social, political, and cultural identity.

More information on the series can be found here.

To listen to an interview with Jason Togyer, author of For the Love of Murphy's, on KQV LiveLine with PJ Maloney, click here.

To read Sandy Thatcher's writings about copyright and general publishing issues, click here.

For information about the Google Print controversy and the Penn State Press, click here.