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

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920
Ureña Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

Rust Belt Burlesque
The Softer Side of a Heavy Metal Town
Rust Belt Burlesque traces the history of burlesque in Cleveland from the 1800s to the present, while also telling the story of Bella Sin, a Mexican immigrant who largely drove Northeast Ohio’s burlesque comeback. Over 100 color photos provide a peek into the raucous Ohio Burlesque Festival that packs the Beachland Ballroom every year.

Age of Concrete
Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique
Age of Concrete is about people building homes on tenuous ground in the outer neighborhoods of Maputo, Mozambique, places thought of simply as slums. But up close, they are an archive: houses of reeds, wood, zinc, and concrete embodying the ambitions of people who built their own largest investment and greatest bequest to the future.

Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany
The Cultural Policy of National Socialism
Kamenetsky shows how Nazis used children’s literature to shape a “Nordic Germanic” worldview, intended to strengthen the German folk community, the Führer, and the fatherland by imposing a racial perspective on mankind. Their thus corroded the last remnants of the Weimar Republic’s liberal education, while promoting a following for Hitler.

Children of Hope
The Odyssey of the Oromo Slaves from Ethiopia to South Africa
In Children of Hope, Sandra Rowoldt Shell details the life histories of sixty-four Oromo children who were enslaved in Ethiopia in the late nineteenth century, liberated by the British navy, and ultimately sent to a Free Church of Scotland mission in South Africa, where their stories were recorded through a series of interviews.