By Robin E. Jensen, Associate Dean for Research, College of Humanities

College of Humanities faculty are publishing books at an extraordinary pace—and placing their work with many of the world’s leading scholarly, literary and trade presses.

A book can take years to complete. It may require sustained archival research, fieldwork in distant communities, the translation of unfamiliar texts, the recovery of overlooked histories or the painstaking development of a new philosophical argument. For poets and fiction writers, it may represent years spent refining language, structure and form.

Since 2020, faculty in the University of Utah’s College of Humanities have completed this demanding process 94 times. A new inventory of faculty books reveals both the remarkable volume and extraordinary range of scholarship emerging from the college. The 94 books published between 2020 and 2026 exceed the 86 books listed for the entire previous decade, from 2010 through 2019. Average annual output rose from 8.6 books during the 2010s to 13.4 books per year since 2020—an increase of approximately 56%.

The books have also appeared through many of the world’s most respected publishers. The list includes 15 books from Oxford University Press, five from Cambridge University Press, and titles from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Duke, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, California and other leading university presses. Faculty have also reached readers through prominent literary and trade publishers such as Penguin Press, W. W. Norton, Copper Canyon Press, Deep Vellum Publishing, Red Hen Press and Turtle Point Press.

2020: Language, agency and the stories people tell

The seven-year period began with 13 books in 2020, spanning literary studies, philosophy, rhetoric, history and the environmental humanities.

Craig Dworkin’s Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality, published by the University of Chicago Press, examined the material possibilities of poetic language. Margaret Wan’s Regional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800–1937, published by Harvard University Press, centered a popular literary and performance tradition in Chinese cultural history. Elizabeth Callaway’s Eden’s Endemics: Narratives of Biodiversity on Earth and Beyond, from the University of Virginia Press, brought literary analysis to questions of biodiversity and imagined worlds.

The year’s historical and rhetorical scholarship reached across regions and institutions. Michael Christopher Low published Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj with Columbia University Press. Jennifer Andrus examined domestic violence, policing and identity in Narratives of Domestic Violence, published by Cambridge University Press. Chris Ingraham explored the cultural work of care and concern in Gestures of Concern, from Duke University Press.
C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art, published by Oxford University Press, closed the year’s snapshot with a philosophical account of games, agency and art. Together, the titles moved from poetry and popular literature to biodiversity, pilgrimage, violence, public feeling and play.

2021: Science, sound and public life

Faculty published 14 books in 2021, connecting the humanities to science, environmental history, journalism, political communication, gender and transpacific literature.

Melinda Fagan’s Stem Cells, published by Cambridge University Press, brought philosophical inquiry to a rapidly developing area of biology. Julie Ault’s Saving Nature under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968–1990, also from Cambridge, recovered a history of environmentalism that crossed the political boundaries of the Cold War. Eric Herschthal examined science, slavery and ideas of progress in The Science of Abolition, published by Yale University Press.
Questions of media and public life shaped several additional books. Jacob Nelson’s Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public, published by Oxford University Press, focused on how journalists understand the people they hope to reach. Kevin Coe coauthored The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times, also published by Oxford, examining presidential communication in a transformed media environment.

Literary and cultural scholarship broadened the year’s reach. David Roh’s Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions, published by Stanford University Press, crossed national and literary traditions. Kathryn Bond Stockton’s Gender(s), from The MIT Press, reconsidered gender and its many forms. Matthew Potolsky edited The Collected Works of Walter Pater: Classical Studies, Volume 8 for Oxford University Press.

Jonathan Stone’s Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s, published by the University of Michigan Press, brought sound, rhetoric, history and archival research together. The year demonstrated how humanities scholarship can move from laboratories and political institutions to literature, gender and song.

2022: Fiction, translation and the institutions that shape us

The 13 books published in 2022 included experimental fiction, literary translation, philosophy, religious studies, history and critical approaches to race and institutional life.
Rone Shavers placed creative writing at the center of the year with Silverfish, published by Clash Books. Fiona Bell translated Nataliya Meshchaninova’s Stories of a Life for Deep Vellum Publishing, extending the college’s engagement with contemporary literature across languages. Maeera Shreiber’s Holy Envy Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone, published by Fordham University Press, explored writing across religious traditions and boundaries.

Andrea Baldwin developed a decolonial Black feminist approach to reading and university life in A Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and Shade: Feeling the University, published by Routledge. Ella Myers examined the continuing impacts of racial hierarchy through W.E.B. Du Bois in The Gratifications of Whiteness, from Oxford University Press. Danielle Olden reconstructed the relationship among Mexican Americans, school desegregation and racial formation in Racial Uncertainties, published by the University of California Press.

Nathan Devir’s First-Century Christians in Twenty-First Century Africa, published by Brill, considered Christian communities in Gabon and Madagascar. Jonah Schupbach’s Bayesianism and Scientific Reasoning, from Cambridge University Press, examined evidence and inference in scientific practice.

The year’s selected books moved among experimental fiction, translation, religion, education, race and the philosophy of science—another reminder that humanities research is defined less by a single subject than by the questions it enables scholars to ask.

2023: Poetry, power and difficult choices

Book production reached its highest point in 2023, when faculty published 17 titles. The year was especially strong in creative writing while also producing significant work in philosophy, environmental communication, politics, Indigenous studies and writing education.

Katharine Coles’s Ghost Apples, published by Red Hen Press, Jacqueline Osherow’s Divine Ratios: Poems, from LSU Press, and Alejandro Quin’s Spanish-language Tentación del vértigo, published by Nueve Editores, placed poetry at the forefront of the college’s annual publications. The three collections demonstrate the range of creative work emerging from the college across languages, forms and intellectual traditions.

Several books confronted questions of power and public decision-making. Danielle Endres’s Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting, published by The Ohio State University Press, connected nuclear infrastructure to Indigenous resistance. Baodong Liu examined how racial and religious groups gain and lose political influence in Political Volatility in the United States, published by Lexington Books.

Philosophers approached choice and explanation from different directions. Chrisoula Andreou’s Choosing Well: The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial, published by Oxford University Press, considered how people distinguish what matters from what does not. Elijah Millgram’s Why Didn’t Nietzsche Get His Act Together?, also from Oxford, turned philosophical attention toward coherence, action and a famously complicated life.

The year also reflected the college’s strength in language, literacy and education. Jay Jordan’s Grounded Literacies in a Transnational WAC/WID Ecology, published by the WAC Clearinghouse, examined writing across Korean and U.S. contexts. MaryAnn Christison coauthored Multilingual Approach to Diversity in Education (MADE), published by Palgrave Macmillan. Christie Toth’s Transfer in an Urban Writing Ecology, from the National Council of Teachers of English, reimagined relationships between community colleges and universities.

Isabel Dulfano edited Walking on Our Sacred Path: Indigenous American Women Affirming Identity and Activism, published by Peter Lang. Across 17 books, 2023 paired a remarkable level of productivity with a range extending from poetry and philosophy to nuclear policy, political volatility, Indigenous activism and multilingual education.

2024: Experimental literature and contested histories

The college published 11 books in 2024, including innovative fiction and literary criticism, as well as research in rhetoric, history and global cultures.

Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass, published by Dzanc Books, continued the college’s contributions to experimental contemporary fiction. Cindi Textor’s Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility, published by the University of California Press, examined literature, identity and the ethical demands created by illegibility.

David Bresnahan’s Inland from Mombasa: East Africa and the Making of the Indian Ocean World, also published by the University of California Press, repositioned East Africa within a broader regional history. Isabel Moreira’s Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint, published by Oxford University Press, reconstructed an extraordinary medieval life.

Other books addressed contested speech and political struggle. Kendall Gerdes’s Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, brought rhetorical analysis into conversation with academic life. Alborz Ghandehari’s Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle, from Northwestern University Press, connected political struggle to renewed forms of cultural and historical imagination.

Paul Reeve coauthored This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah, published by Oxford University Press. Taken together, the year’s selected titles moved from experimental fiction and Zainichi literature to East Africa, medieval Europe, Iran and Utah’s own contested past.

2025: Literary form, decolonial futures and human-centered communication

Faculty published 13 books in 2025, with literary scholarship and storytelling sharing the stage with philosophy, feminist studies, pedagogy, environmental humanities and professional communication.

Jeremy Rosen examined how contemporary writers reshape established genres in Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction, published by Stanford University Press. Joseph Metz explored empathy, aesthetics and German literary form in The Feeling of the Form, from Cornell University Press. Romeo García’s There Is No Making It Out: Stories-So-Far and the Possibilities of New Stories, published by Utah State University Press, placed storytelling, inheritance and possibility at the center of rhetorical inquiry.

Annie Isabel Fukushima edited Decolonial Feminist Genealogies and Futures, published by the University of Illinois Press, connecting histories of feminist thought to future possibilities. Leandra Hernández coauthored Queer, Women of Color, and Critical Approaches to Feminist Mentorship and Pedagogy, also published by the University of Illinois Press, bringing critical attention to mentorship, teaching and institutional relationships.

Erin Beeghly’s What’s Wrong with Stereotyping?, published by Oxford University Press, examined a persistent problem in social judgment. Curtis Newbold coauthored Business and Professional Communication: A Human-Centered Approach, published by SAGE, extending humanities expertise into workplaces and professional settings.

Melissa Parks coauthored Storying Plant Communication: More-than-Human Relationships in New Mexico, published by Bloomsbury Academic. The year’s books moved from literary form and feminist genealogy to stereotyping, mentorship, business communication and relationships with the more-than-human world.

2026: Inheritance, information and global transformation

The list identifies another 13 books in 2026, continuing the college’s sustained level of productivity and intellectual range.

Paisley Rekdal’s Heritance: Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press, places poetry at the center of the year’s creative work. Nathan Wainstein’s Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, considers the aesthetic possibilities of literary style that appears to fail. Stacey Margolis’s The Future Is Fiction: A Cultural History of Intergenerational Justice, from Oxford University Press, connects literary culture to obligations across generations.

Thomas Swensen’s The Great Land: An Indigenous History of Alaska, published by the University of Washington Press, centers Indigenous history in an account of Alaska. Susie Porter’s Señorita Telefonista: Sexual Harassment, Gender Discrimination, and Class Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico City, from the University of Nebraska Press, recovers the experiences of women telephone workers. Ashton Lazarus’s Performing Transgressions: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan, published by the Harvard University Asia Center, turns to performance and social boundaries in premodern Japan.

Hua Zhu’s Interconnectivity: Global Rhetorics and Power Transformation, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, examines rhetoric and changing relationships of power in an interconnected world. Benjamin Lyons addresses information engagement and truth discernment in Misinformation and the Aging American, published by Oxford University Press.
Brandon Peterson coauthored Christ the Savior: Historical Models for an Ecumenical Future, published by Fortress Press, contributing religious history and theology to the year’s range. The selected books from 2026 move across poetry, modernist literature, Indigenous history, gender and labor, Japan, global rhetoric, misinformation and ecumenical thought.

Books as research impact

Books are among the most enduring forms of research impact. They establish new fields of inquiry, reshape scholarly conversations, preserve languages and histories, influence public debate and offer readers new ways of understanding themselves and the world.

The College of Humanities’ 94 books represent thousands of hours of research, writing, collaboration, editing and creative work. They also reflect an intellectual community capable of moving between scholarly and creative forms and engaging questions that cross disciplinary and geographic boundaries.

From public health and climate change to digital communication, democracy, race, gender, religion, art and global citizenship, the challenges facing society are also human challenges. The books produced by College of Humanities faculty ensure that history, ethics, culture, language and lived experience remain central to how those challenges are understood.

Ninety-four books in seven years is an impressive numerical achievement. More importantly, it represents 94 substantial contributions to knowledge—and 94 new ways of seeing the world.

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