NEW PUBLISHING PARTNERSHIP MAKES CONTEMPORARY COMMENTARY ON ART AND POLITICS WIDELY AVAILABLE

Amherst College Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are pleased to announce a publishing partnership that furthers their commitment to advancing the understanding of the intersection of art and politics. All titles will be available to purchase in print format and will be freely available digitally, thus opening the important research to an entirely new generation of scholars and readers throughout the world.

Amherst College Press publishes pathbreaking, peer-reviewed scholarship and makes it available to readers everywhere as digital, open-access work. Titles are published on Fulcrum, a platform created by University of Michigan Publishing, allowing narrative to be richly integrated with multimedia and optimized for long-term preservation and accessibility.

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is a non-profit research center at The New School in New York. Through its dynamic interdisciplinary programs, conferences, artist fellowships, residencies, exhibitions, and publications, the VLC imagines and supports new forms of politically engaged art, research, public scholarship, and community around the world.

Of the partnership, VLC Senior Director and Chief Curator Carin Kuoni has said: “It is enormously gratifying to partner with an academic leader such as Amherst College. Together, we will be a true force for new scholarship, artistic research, and I couldn’t be more excited to bring this work—through Amherst’s digital platform—to the world for free. Such an approach to public scholarship reinforces our own values of accessibility and inclusivity.”

Beth Bouloukos, Director of Amherst College Press, remarks: “The mission and vision of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics perfectly align with ACP’s commitments to publishing innovative, socially-engaged scholarship that is accessible to all readers, regardless of geography or ability to pay. We look forward to working with the VLC on the unique print books for which they’re known, and we’re particularly excited to partner together to publish these works as accessible ebooks that will reach broad and diverse audiences.”

The partnership’s first publication, Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech, is a collection of texts, artist projects, and historic resources examining aspects of freedom of speech informed by recent debates around hate speech, censorship, sexism, and racism. Designed by Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Chair of Graphic Design at Yale University, and Julia Novitch, the book itself plays with the concept of darkness as both a tonal variation and a factor of legibility, a space from which truth can be hindered or produced. Studies into Darkness is available to read now at acpress.amherst.edu. The print book releases on October 1, 2022.

Forthcoming titles include Seeds of Change, the first book to highlight renowned Brazilian-born artist Maria Thereza Alves’s research into the rich history of ballast flora—plant seeds found in the soil used to balance shipping vessels—to trace the relationship between displaced plant species and the colonial maritime trade of goods and enslaved peoples.

Press Contact
Chelsey Harris
acpress-marketing@amherst.edu