About Ohio University Press

Incorporated in 1947 and formally organized in 1964 by Ohio University president Vernon Alden, Ohio University Press is the oldest scholarly publisher in Ohio. Since its founding, the Press (including its trade imprint, Swallow Press) has developed into a leading publisher of books about Africa, Appalachia, Southeast Asia, and the Midwest, as well as on many other topics. From academic monographs to regional guides to internationally acclaimed literary works, its books have established the Press as an essential member of its many communities: scholarly, literary, and geographic.

The Press publishes between forty-five and fifty books a year. Distributed worldwide, its books are regularly covered by prominent national and international news and review media; in countless academic journals; and in a wide variety of literary and cultural outlets.

The Press regularly partners with other scholarly and cultural institutions. In recent years, these have included the State Library of Ohio, the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, the Ohio University Center for International Studies, the Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland museums of art, and the Polish American Historical Association.

Swallow Press

What began as a publishing partnership with the distinguished literary publisher Swallow Press has continued with Ohio University Press’s acquisition in 2008 of Swallow. Under the Swallow Press imprint, the Press continues to publish its esteemed literary list—including reissues of the works of such iconic authors as Anaïs Nin, Janet Lewis, Frank Waters, and Anna Akhmatova—as well as guidebooks, regional interest titles, and general nonfiction.

New Titles

Michael Field
Decadent Moderns
As “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper conversed with fin-de-siècle aesthetic movements and twentieth-century modernism, articulated ideas associated with the New Woman, and expressed queer desire. Essays address Michael Field’s engagements with a range of cultural touchstones, highlighting their work’s radicalism and relevance.

Welcome to the Neighborhood
An Anthology of American Coexistence
How to live with difference is a defining worry in contemporary America. In this enormously rich resource for the classroom and for anyone interested in reflecting on what it means to be American today, poets, fiction writers, and essayists, with open minds and nuance, ask what it means to be neighbors.

Africa Every Day
Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent
Africa Every Day is a multidisciplinary and accessible counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis on war, poverty, corruption, and other challenges on the continent. Essays address creative and dynamic elements of daily life without romanticizing them, showing that African leisure and popular culture are the product of dynamism and adaptation.

Seeing Like a Citizen
Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980
In focusing on rural Kenyans as they actively sought access to aid, Moskowitz offers new insights into the texture of political life in the decolonizing and early postcolonial world. Her account complicates our understanding of Kenyan experiences of independence, and the meaning and form of development.

Ambivalent
Photography and Visibility in African History
Ambivalent makes photography into an engaging and important subject of historical investigation. Contributors bring photography into conversation with orality, travel writing, ritual, psychoanalysis, and politics, with new approaches to questions of race, time, and postcolonial and decolonial histories.