Matthew Engelke and Prickly Paradigm Press: The Return of the Pamphleteer

Initially, Palgrave only accepted Pivots by individual authors, such as “when an author was expanding on a strong working paper but didn’t have enough time or content to work on a fulllength monograph — and equally didn’t want to cut down their argument to journal article length. Unlike other publishers, our short format is still original, peer reviewed research rather than a review or summary of a topic.”

Yet, authors began to ask Palgrave about publishing short edited volumes based on events such as small workshops or conference panels. They revisited their publishing criteria and “realized that sometimes a short collection of well-aligned chapters is actually more useful to readers than a big edited volume with 12-15 chapters that may lack coherence. So, we continuously revise how we publish original research and like to experiment with new formats.”

Ros Pyne, now Director, Open Access Books and Book Policies at Springer Nature, says that Palgrave developed an OA model for the Pivots as part of their wider OA book program. Palgrave has published a variety of OA Pivots since they began in 2014, many sponsored by funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the EC’s Horizon 2020 program, as well as by many individual institutions. “We have also seen great usage for these publications: our most-accessed 2019 OA Pivot, The Values of Independent Hip Hop in the Post-Golden Era, has already had 120,000 downloads, while Disrupting Finance (also 2019) has been downloaded 85,000 times.”

brian also remarked that, with the success of the Pivot series, Palgrave “launched another new format of short, accessible books written by influential academics with direct policymaking experience. Palgrave Policy Essentials are designed to appeal to a wide audience, with clear summaries on policy implications and recommendations for action.”

university of Minnesota Press: Forerunners

from page 16

of this would exist without the person reading your stuff! They should take primacy here, you know? What do they want? What will they bare? Forerunners is a great example — we didn’t know if readers would go for them. We knew scholars and authors wanted it. We wanted it and we were willing to take a risk — and it turns out that readers really like them.”

“We can serve readers and I can keep the cost contained in various ways — you don’t see any Forerunners heavily illustrated, for instance, and permissions can be a big factor in cost. With all of that it’s worth it to us. And who knows — maybe they will grow in readership, but I still think it’s only going to be some percentage.”

Forerunners has been a real success for Minnesota and the willingness to take such risks has been amply justified.

by Steven Weiland (Professor, Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University) <weiland@msu.edu>

Written by Steven Weiland based on a Zoom conversation with Matthew Engelke, Professor of Religious Studies at Columbia University on September 24, 2020. Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity.

Matthew Engelke is Professor of Religious Studies at Columbia university and editor at the Prickly Paradigm Press in Chicago. He is the author of God’s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England (University of California Press, 2013) and How to Think Like An Anthropologist (Princeton University Press, 2019). In the late 1990s, Engelke stepped in as a young ethnographer to help guide the British Prickly Pear Press to an American presence but with a new name required by U.S. copyright requirements. He has been at an editor there since. The Press has published 54 books which are distributed by the university of Chicago Press. Engelke has maintained the tradition represented by the university of Chiacademic thinker Marshall Sahlins, who has been affiliated with the Prickly Pear and then the Prickly Paradigm Press for decades, now as Executive Publisher.

Like Sahlins, Engelke sees the pamphlet and the pamphleteer as historical examples, and now contemporary images, of a style cago’s renowned anthropologist and independent

in communications that can add something important to academic writing. The Press’ motto is “The Old-Time Pamphlet is Back.” For Engelke, the idea is to “get something out quickly as a passionate argument, to go beyond the kinds of things you can say in a conventional academic argument and the ways they can be said.” The 18th century pamphlet style is in the background of the press but, according to Engelke, so too is the media revolution of the 20th century, including that element of McLuhanism that focused on the increasingly fast pace of communications. But, it is not only speed that matters for Prickly Paradigm. So does the impact of short books. Engelke guides authors toward reaching two kinds of audiences. The first can be discipline focused continued on page 24