Mark Simpson-Vos, Wyndham Robertson Editorial Director
I am honored to hold the Wyndham Robertson Editorial Directorship, named for a pathbreaking editor, higher education administrator, and champion of university press publishing, Wyndham Robertson.
As editorial director, I manage and provide strategic direction for the UNC Press acquisitions team. I also commission and acquire a diverse list of general-interest and scholarly books. As an editor, one of my greatest pleasures is working with authors whose books reflect superior scholarly research while contextualizing and explaining key subjects, moments, and ideas for a wider public.
I am fortunate to work with emerging and well-established writers across a broad range of subjects and academic disciplines. My principal focus is in the field of religious studies, which employs a variety of scholarly methods to assess the role of religion in the human experience. UNC Press’s list is broad and deep, with particular strengths in historical, ethnographic, and material culture approaches. I am especially interested in work that centers on Black religious experience; positions religion as a central consideration in global and transnational networks of thought and practice; assesses the role of race, genders, sexualities, and nationalities in religious experience; and uses the ideas of material and lived religion to expand our ideas about religious ideas, communities, and practices.
I also acquire scholarly and general-interest books in the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. Our “Critical Indigeneities” series seeks work that is firmly grounded in the questions and methods of critical Indigenous studies, centering Indigenous people knowledge and practice and seeking to advance our collective understanding of Indigenous sovereignties. I also acquire work grounded in other humanities and social science methods and meaningfully focused on Indigenous actors, both past and present.
Finally, I acquire selectively in the fields of American history and American culture. I have a special interest in books on American music, broadly defined, and am especially eager to publish new work that challenges and expands conventional ideas about American roots genres, including the blues, jazz, folk, country, and rock.
My scholarly background is American literature and American studies, including graduate work (M.A. 1995, A.B.D. 1998) at UNC-Chapel Hill. I earned a B.A. in English and Political Science from Gustavus Adolphus College. I joined the Press staff in 1998.
Series
- Critical Indigeneities (Jean M. O’Brien and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, editors)
- Gender and American Culture (Mary Kelley and Martha S. Jones, editors)
- Islamic Civilizations and Muslim Networks (Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, editors)
- Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era (William A. Blair, editor)
- Studies in United States Culture (Grace Elizabeth Hale, editor)
- Where Religion Lives (Kristy Nabhan-Warren, editor)
Contact
Email: mark.simpson-vos@uncpress.org
Twitter: @MarkSV