In today's stop on the University Press Week Blog Tour (November 12-17), our Director of Sales and Marketing, Jane Kelly, discusses the many neighbourhoods that constitute and define the city of Toronto, and how UTP publishes for and about those neighbourhoods as part of its mission. An excellent contribution for today's theme of #TurnItUP: The Neighbourhood.

By Jane Kelly

Earlier this year the UTP Book Publishing group moved to a new location in Toronto. After almost 30 years in the same office, we moved to a brand new high tech open concept office space in downtown Toronto. As a new employee and a suburbanite, this was my first time working downtown and this move gave me the opportunity to explore and learn more about the city.

Toronto is known by many different nicknames: The Big Smoke, T Dot, The Six. It is the biggest city in Canada and is the financial centre of Canada. However, it is not a cosmopolitan city, it is a city of neighbourhoods. The Toronto Star recently published a listing of 170 unique neighbourhoods identified by their geographic boundaries, history, or unique population. A ten-minute walk from our new office location can take you to Yorkville, the Kensington Market, the Annex, or the financial district. Walk a little more and you can tour the entertainment district, Little Italy, or the Distillery District.

UTP recognizes these diverse neighbourhoods by publishing titles that celebrate the cultures, people, and politics of Toronto’s neighbourhoods. Toronto Iberic and Toronto Italian Studies Series give a voice to scholarship and research for these populations. Individual books like Kensington Market by Na Li focus exclusively on well-known Toronto neighbourhoods. UTP also publishes many books focused on important issues that affect individuals in these neighbourhoods like racism, poverty, the environment, and education. Our recent publication, Queering Urban Justice, examines how to map space in ways that address very real histories of displacement and erasure.

As I discover Toronto, I also learn more about the thousands of books from the UTP list. After a short 9 months with the book publishing team, I am so impressed with my coworkers’ dedication to the mission of the organization “to publish exemplary works of scholarship, and to disseminate knowledge widely for the benefit of society.”

In Canada, research shows that loneliness is reaching epidemic levels and one in five people suffer from loneliness, the effects of which can be as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Social media technology designed to bring people together could be contributing to increased feelings of loneliness. People need to connect with others and find a community. Perhaps by giving a voice to Toronto neighbourhoods, UTP can help people be more connected.

To continue on Day Three of the University Press Week Blog Tour, check out posts by these other fine university presses:

University of Manitoba Press
Blog: https://uofmpress.ca/blog
Twitter: @umanitobapress

Syracuse University Press
Blog: https://syracusepress.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @SUPress

Fordham University Press
Blog: www.fordhampress.com/blog
Twitter: @FordhamPress

Northwestern University Press
Blog: https://incidentalnoyes.com/
Twitter: @northwesternUP

University Press of Mississippi
Blog: http://upmississippi.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @upmiss

Temple University Press
Blog: https://templepress.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @TempleUnivPress

University of Alberta Press
Blog: https://holeinthebucket.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @UAlbertaPress

University of Texas Press
Blog: http://utpressnews.blogspot.com
Twitter: @UTexasPress

University of Washington Press
Blog: https://uwpressblog.com/
Twitter: @UWAPress

Johns Hopkins University Press
Blog: https://www.press.jhu.edu/news/blog
Twitter: @JHUPress

University of Illinois Press
Blog: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/
Twitter: @IllinoisPress

Rutgers University Press
Blog: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/category/news/
Twitter: @RutgersUPress

Oregon State University Press
Blog: http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/blog
Twitter: @OSUPress

Columbia University Press
Blog: cupblog.org
Twitter: @ColumbiaUP

University of Georgia Press
Blog: ugapress.wordpress.com
Twitter: @UGAPress

TORONTO - Canada’s largest scholarly publisher, University of Toronto Press (UTP), has outgrown the office it has called home for the past thirty years. On Monday, April 16, UTP’s book publishing staff from editorial, sales, marketing, design and production, as well as its human resources and administrative teams will settle into a brand new, state-of-the-art office space at the corner of Bay and College, in downtown Toronto.

The move is part of a re-structuring for UTP’s much lauded publishing program. After a decade of operating on parallel paths, and in separate cities, the company’s Scholarly Publishing and Higher Education divisions are coming together under one roof. Moving forward, these two groups will join forces and resources as part of UTP’s Book Publishing Division.

“Our new office is symbolic of the confidence we have in the future of scholarly publishing and in UTP itself,” says UTP’s Chief Executive Officer, John Yates.  “Consolidating the book publishing teams will make us more nimble and puts us in a better position to respond to the needs of our authors and customers, both at home and around the world.”

The company’s spacious new location boasts an open-concept design, natural light from floor-to-ceiling windows and cutting-edge technologies. All of the workstations and panels are constructed from recycled materials, which represents more than an aesthetic consideration, according to Lynn Fisher, UTP’s Vice President, Book Publishing.

“Being environmentally responsible is a corporate priority for us as a book publisher,” says Fisher. “Over the past few years, UTP has become widely seen as a major platform for new work in urban planning and environmental studies. That’s another reason we’d be remiss to not build a ‘healthier’ work space.”  

UTP’s Book Publishing Division will be located at 800 Bay Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3A9. Phone numbers and email addresses are unchanged. Contact information for the company’s Journals, Retail and Distribution divisions remains the same.

Founded in 1901, University of Toronto Press (UTP) is Canada’s leading scholarly publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, releasing over 200 new scholarly, reference, and general-interest books each year, as well as maintaining a backlist of over 3500 titles in print. For more information, visit utorontopress.com.

Happy Pride Month Toronto! This month we have been tweeting about what you should add to your LGBTQ+ reading list. Here are a few more titles you may be interested in. Have a safe and happy Pride! 

Constance Maynard's Passions: Religion, Sexuality, and an English Educational Pioneer, 1849-1935

By Pauline A. Phipps

Successful but self-tormented, English educational pioneer Constance Maynard (1849–1935) was a deeply religious evangelical Christian whose personal atonement theology demanded that one resist carnal feelings to achieve personal salvation. As the founder of Westfield College at the University of London, Maynard championed women’s access to a university education. As the college’s first principal, she also engaged in a string of passionate relationships with college women in which she imagined love as God’s gift as well as a test of her faith.

Using Maynard’s extensive personal papers, especially her diaries and autobiography, Pauline A. Phipps examines how the language of her faith offered Maynard the means with which to carve out an independent career and to forge a distinct same-sex sexual self-consciousness in an era when middle-class women were expected to be subservient to men and confined to the home. Constance Maynard’s Passions is the fascinating account of a life which confounds the usual categories of faith, gender, and sexuality.

Love’s Refraction: Jealousy and Compersion in Queer Women's Polyamorous Relationships

By Jillian Deri

Popular wisdom might suggest that jealousy is an inevitable outcome of non-monogamous relationships. In Love’s Refraction, Jillian Deri explores the distinctive question of how and why polyamorists – people who practice consensual non-monogamy – manage jealousy. Her focus is on the polyamorist concept of “compersion” – taking pleasure in a lover’s other romantic and sexual encounters.

By discussing the experiences of queer, lesbian, and bisexual polyamorous women, Deri highlights the social and structural context that surrounds jealousy. Her analysis, making use of the sociology of emotion and feminist intersectionality theory, shows how polyamory challenges traditional emotional and sexual norms.

Clear and concise, Love’s Refraction speaks to both the academic and the polyamorous community. Deri lets her interviewees speak for themselves, linking academic theory and personal experiences in a sophisticated, engaging, and accessible way.

Valerii Pereleshin: The Life of a Silkworm

By Olga Bakich

Olga Bakich’s biography of Valerii Pereleshin (1913–1992) follows the turbulent life and exquisite poetry of one of the most remarkable Russian émigrés of the twentieth century. Born in Irkutsk, Pereleshin lived for thirty years in China and for almost forty years in Brazil. Multilingual, he wrote poetry in Russian and in Portuguese and translated Chinese and Brazilian poetry into Russian and Russian and Chinese poetry into Portuguese. For many years he struggled to accept and express his own identity as a gay man within a frequently homophobic émigré community. His poems addressed his three homelands, his religious struggles, and his loves. In Valerii Pereleshin: The Life of a Silkworm, Bakich delves deep into Pereleshin’s poems and letters to tell the rich life story of this underappreciated writer.

Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis

By Laurie Marhoefer

Liberated, licentious, or merely liberal, the sexual freedoms of Germany’s Weimar Republic have become legendary. The home of the world’s first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progressive, secular vision of sexual liberation. Immortalized – however misleadingly – in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the musical Cabaret, Weimar’s freedoms have become a touchstone for the politics of sexual emancipation.

Yet, as Laurie Marhoefer shows in Sex and Weimar Republic, those sexual freedoms were only obtained at the expense of a minority who were deemed sexually disordered. In Weimar Germany, the citizen’s right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable.

Sex and the Weimar Republic examines the rise of sexual tolerance through the debates which surrounded “immoral” sexuality: obscenity, male homosexuality, lesbianism, transgender identity, heterosexual promiscuity, and prostitution. It follows the sexual politics of a swath of Weimar society ranging from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to Nazi stormtrooper Ernst Röhm. Tracing the connections between toleration and regulation, Marhoefer’s observations remain relevant to the politics of sexuality today.

Congress is just over one week away and we are getting excited to make our way down to the Mattamy Centre with all the other presses and set up our book exhibit! We hope to see you some time during the week at booth 14. This year we are 5 booths wide (6 if you count our sister division UTP Distribution) so you can’t miss us.

What can you look forward to from us at Congress this year? Read on to find out.

Integration of Books and Journals

Some of you may know that we publish more than just books here at UTP. Alongside our scholarly books and course books, our journals division puts out top-quality journals across many disciplines. This year at Congress we will be displaying books and journals in the same booth, to make it that much easier for you to see all we have to offer.

The Canada 150 Collection

We are excited to debut our collection to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial year. We have chosen a special selection of outstanding books published over the years that bear witness to the depth and breadth of the nation’s history and the diversity of its peoples. These books showcase remarkable achievements as well as uncomfortable truths in Canada’s history, from pre-Confederation to the present. This carefully curated collection includes classic works of cultural, historical, legal, and literary scholarship that have informed and shaped Canada as a nation.

A selection of these books will be showcased at Congress, and all can be ordered there or online. We are also holding a Canada 150 giveaway – stop by the booth and enter to win one of our packages.

The Slow Professor New in Paperback

The Slow Professor is moving along quickly! Approximately one year after the release of the hardback version of The Slow Professor, we are happy to be putting out a paperback version. The paperback version, which features a new forward by Stefan Collini, debuted a few weeks ago at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting and we are pleased to be taking it to quite a few conferences going forward. Buy it at Congress and receive a 25% discount.

Of course, we will also have a huge selection of our books and journals, giveaways, examination copies of our course books, and our knowledgeable editors and marketing staff as reasons to pop by the booth. See you at Congress!

Today marks the start of University Press Week. The goal this week is to highlight the extraordinary work of nonprofit scholarly publishers and their many contributions to culture, the academy, and an informed society. In 2016, our theme is "Celebrate Community," which is meant to include a range from academic or campus communities, to communities of readers across North America, to the very geographically-based communities in which we are based. To kick off the discussion as part of the UP Week Blog Tour, our history editor, Natalie Fingerhut, offers the following thoughts on how the Higher Education Division of University of Toronto Press has found a role for its authors in a like-minded community of seniors in downtown Toronto who are eager to learn more about why history matters.

Besides being the acquisitions editor in the Higher Education Division of University of Toronto Press, I also sit on the Board of Directors at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre (MNJcc) in downtown Toronto.

Several years ago, I helped conduct a needs assessment of the MNJcc’s “Active 55 Plus” demographic. I asked them: “What kind of programming do you want the Jcc to provide to you?” These are the answers I received:

“We want stimulating lectures!”

“We want history and politics and current events and book clubs!”

“We want to learn. Just because we are in our 70s doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything new!”

“Our bodies may hurt, but our minds are intact!”

“We are lonely. We want to be with people learning!”

I kept their voices in my head.

In the fall of 2015, I collaborated with Lisa Roy, the dynamic programmer for our Active 55 Plus group, to launch a new series called “Why History Matters Today.” The series features authors I have published through University of Toronto Press. They come to the Jcc and lecture on historical events that remain relevant today.

Our first lecture in fall 2015 attracted about 80 people. It featured Steven Bednarski, a professor of medieval history at the University of Waterloo, who spoke about the relationship between climate change, the plague, and medieval anti-semitism. Next was award-winning Renaissance lecturer Kenneth R. Bartlett from the University of Toronto who spoke on Andrea Palladio and Palladianism, demonstrating to listeners Palladio’s influence on Venetian villas as well as on Toronto condos. The final lecture of fall 2015 was a Canadian Jewish historian, Professor Franklin Bialystok from the University of Toronto, who spoke about the history of the Jews of Canada.

At all lectures, the audiences were alive with questions and curiosity. The “Question and Answer” periods went into overtime. Project evaluations were all 10 out of 10.

The following spring, we had Trent University’s Dimitry Anastakis, who energetically dispelled the common perception that Canadian history is boring. Professor Harold Troper from the University of Toronto shared his vast knowledge of a shameful event in Canadian history, the participation of Canadian athletes in the Munich Olympic Games.

This past September, we welcomed back Kenneth R. Bartlett and Franklin Bialystok and asked them to focus on the theme of historical demise. Kenneth spoke about the demise of Renaissance Florence at the hands of a fiery populist preacher, Savonarola, and warned the audience that we were facing another fiery populist south of the border. Frank took on the contentious and emotional issue of the demise of one of Canada’s major Jewish organizations, the Canadian Jewish Congress.

After every lecture, people came up to thank me for helping to put this series together.

“Well,” I said. “I think history is important. It is a good teacher for anyone at any age.”

This belief in the value of history as a teacher is both my motivation for being a history editor and for engaging the Active 55 Plus group at the Jcc. As Steven Bednarski said in his inaugural lecture, it’s not that historians believe that if we don’t know our history, we are doomed to repeat it. It’s more that history can help us predict outcomes: climate change leads to disease which results in scapegoating, and often scapegoating minorities.

History is also a warning bell. Kenneth R. Bartlett, in his lecture on Savonarola, outlined a list of factors that contributed to the rise of a religious populist—some of which contributed to Trump’s recent victory. History can also dispel popularly held beliefs about the past. Franklin Bialystok, for example, implored the largely Jewish audience to know their stories better to understand that Canadian Jewish history is not simply about anti-semitism, but rather a proud history of contribution and accomplishment.

I believe that knowing one’s past makes us more caring, more curious, and more critical citizens of today. And no one is too old to be caring, curious, or critical!

The “Why History Matters Today” series at the MNJcc is an example of two organizations sharing the same values and then working together to put those values into action. The Higher Education Division at University of Toronto Press believes in sharing knowledge by publishing accessible books for generations of students. The MNJcc believes in providing accessible programming for older generations. Together, these two communities have joined forces to provide accessible programming devoted to the sharing of knowledge.

Natalie Fingerhut
History Editor, Higher Education Division

For more great content during University Press Week, follow the hashtag #UPWeek on Twitter. And don't forget to check out other stops on today's UP Blog Tour, including Fordham University Press, Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Athabasca University Press, and the University Press of Florida.