Category: Education

The prompt: When does your press StepUP?

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Like most, if not all university presses, WVU Press is mission-oriented organization with a reputation for publishing works of enduring cultural value. And often these focus on underserved populations and feature voices that are often overlooked or outright ignored.  This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project, edited by Connie Banta, Kristin DeVault-Juelfs, Destinee Harper, Katy Ryan, and Ellen Skirvin, documents the requests for books submitted by imprisoned people for books. Culled from over 70,000 letters received by the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP), this epistolary volume captures the variety of requests from individuals incarcerated in Appalachia.Read More »

Connecting with Amanda Hayes on Appalachian women and higher education

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What inspired you to write about women in higher education in Appalachia?

Really, it was just the surprise of discovering how many of them there were. We
don’t really hear about women in college in Appalachia as far back as the 1800s. When I found out that we had a local college at one time, especially one that early, it didn’t even occur to me that women were attending. I want to see them more widely understood and celebrated. And because I couldn’t stop talking about them, my colleague Dr. Nicole Willey said, “I’ve got bad news for you: I think you need to write a book.” Even then, I didn’t realize I would have enough material for one. Turns out, I had more than I could fit in one.

What do you believe fuels the stereotype of Appalachia being a region hostile to education?

I think it ultimately comes back to the ways that corporate interests have tried to control the story of what it means to be Appalachian. When the industrial revolution turned us from an agricultural region to a mining/logging/manufacturing one, industry leaders wanted us to be workers, not readers. Physical labor became valued over intellectual labor (and these became treated as very different things). If anyone is interested in learning more about how this dynamic came about, I recommend Todd Snyder’s The Rhetoric of Appalachian Identity.Read More »

Portrait of Sol Gittleman with the cover of his book An Accidental Triumph

“Americans have become addicted to rankings.” An excerpt from Sol Gittleman’s new book

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Our distribution partner Vesto Books published their first book earlier this month: Sol Gittleman’s An Accidental Triumph: The Improbable History of American Higher Education. An Accidental Triumph tells the engaging story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the world’s leader in research by the middle of the twentieth. Gittleman – professor emeritus at Tufts University who served as the provost from 1981-2002 – writes with authority, frankness, and unfailing wry good humor.

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