We are delighted to announce the release of Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, edited by Zoltan Biedermann and Alan Strathern.

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.

 Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.

Open access presents the opportunity to revolutionise how – and how widely – knowledge is disseminated. By making research outputs and teaching materials freely available online, readers worldwide can engage with them, regardless of their ability to pay.

Following the successful open access publications of Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and Key Concepts in Public Archaeology, UCL Press is expanding its textbook publishing programme. It now invites applications from UCL academics to submit textbook proposals for any discipline taught at UCL at undergraduate or postgraduate level.

The expansion of our textbook programme demonstrates both UCL’s commitment to harnessing a culture of research-based learning through the Connected Curriculum, and to establishing a world-class digital learning environment.

We are particularly interested in proposals for textbooks that meet one or more of the following criteria:

• Potential to supply large student cohorts for the maximum benefit of the student experience
• Current provision is very expensive or out-of-date
• Where there is currently no textbook provision, because a course is very new, for example
• Potential to create a bespoke textbook tailored to any UCL programme

Multidisciplinary subjects are welcome, as are proposals for textbooks with a digitally innovative approach.

Awards

UCL Press plans to offer 10 awards of £1,500 each to successful applicants. Payment will be on delivery of the final accepted manuscript.

Deadline and evaluation

Please submit a 300-word description of the proposed project by 1 July 2017 to Chris Penfold, UCL Press Commissioning Editor: c.penfold@ucl.ac.uk. Please explain in your description how the project meets the above criteria and what stage the project is at.

UCL Press’s Executive Group (Editorial Board) will evaluate the submissions in the first instance and will then inform authors/editors of the projects it would like to take forward as full proposals. Final acceptance of projects for publication will be dependent on receipt of a full proposal and positive peer review reports.

Production period

Applications are welcome for textbooks that will be ready for manuscript submission between now and July 2019. Publication will follow within approximately 9 months after submission of the final manuscript. Once a textbook has published, the Press will review the potential for updates and new editions where necessary.

We are delighted to announce the publication of Fabricate 2017, edited by Bob Sheil, Achim Menges, Ruairi Glynn and Marilena Skavara .

Bringing together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation, Fabricate is a triennial international conference, now in its third year (ICD, University of Stuttgart, April 2017). Each year it produces a supporting publication, to date the only one of its kind specialising in Digital Fabrication.

The 2017 edition features 32 illustrated articles on built projects and works in progress from academia and practice, including contributions from leading practices such as Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, Arup, and Ron Arad, and from world-renowned institutions including ICD Stuttgart, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton University, The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and the Architectural Association.

From the Enlightenment to the first Apple Mac, universities have been the driving force that change the world. Now a new publication from UCL Press explores the role of philanthropy in a rapidly changing higher education environment.

The publication brings to a wider audience the keynote speech given by investor and philanthropist Dr Gerald Chan, who spoke at UCL’s Insiders Day in July 2016 – a preview for close friends and supporters of the new Campaign for UCL which launched publicly in September 2016. Read about the launch here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign/campaign-news/campaign-launch

Highlighting the vital need for philanthropic public-private partnerships, Dr Chan argues that the independence of universities is crucial for maintaining their dual role as engines of the economy and places of curiosity driven research. He concludes: “This is not a budgetary struggle, it is a struggle for the very soul of the university.”

Payng tribute to Dr Chan in the publication’s foreword, UCL’s President & Provost Professor Michael Arthur says: “We could not have asked for a clearer and more cogent overview of the unique, far-reaching value of philanthropy.

“It is doing something completely different. It enables great researchers to be daring and disruptive, to follow a hunch, to end in a place completely different from the one they expected, to pursue the projects that, for a variety of reasons, public funding cannot support.

“It is this work that produces outcomes that shake society.”

This post originally appeared at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/campaign/campaign-news/Gerald-Chan-philanthropy-and-universities 

UCL Press is delighted to announce a partnership with JSTOR to provide access to open access books on their widely used platform.  JSTOR is a leading digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources used by academics and researchers worldwide. All titles will also be preserved in Portico, ensuring that they will be available to researchers in perpetuity.

The only UK publisher to be an inaugural partner in this programme, UCL Press titles are included in an initial set of open access books available from four leading university presses, including University of California Press, University of Michigan Press and Cornell University Press.  Books published by UCL Press that will appear on JSTOR's widely used platform from Wednesday 26th October include:

• Biostratigraphic and Geological Significance of Planktonic Foraminifera
• Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman 
• Discord and Consensus in the Low Countries, 1700-2000 
• Herman Gorter: Poems of 1890 A Selection
• How the World Changed Social Media
• Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique 
• Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology: Characters and Collections 
• Social Media in an English Village
• Social Media in Industrial China 
• Social Media in Northern Chile 
• Social Media in Rural China 
• Social Media in Southeast Turkey
• Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street 
• Temptation in the Archives: Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture
• Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 
• Treasures from UCL 

The ebooks are freely available for anyone in the world to use and do not have DRM restrictions, nor do they have limits on chapter PDF downloads or printing. Users will not need to register or log in to JSTOR in order to access any of our titles. Free MARC records are available for librarians, who will also be able to activate the titles in discovery services; more information for librarians is available here. The titles are also cross-searchable with other content on JSTOR.org.