Penn State Romance Studies Editorial Board
Robert Blue (Spanish)
Kathryn M. Grossman (French)
Thomas A. Hale (French/Comparative Literature)
Djelal Kadir (Comparative Literature)
Norris J. Lacy (French)
John M. Lipski (Spanish)
Sherry L. Roush (Italian)
Allan Stoekl (French/Comparative Literature)
Penn State Romance Studies Advisory Board
Theodore J. Cachey Jr. (Notre Dame University)
Priscilla Ferguson (Columbia University)
Hazel Gold (Emory University)
Cathy L. Jrade (Vanderbilt University)
William Kennedy (Cornell University)
Gwen Kirkpatrick (Georgetown University)
Rosemary Lloyd (Indiana University
Gerald Prince (University of Pennsylvania)
Joseph T. Snow (Michigan State University)
Jane Taylor (Collingwood College , University of Durham)
Ronald W. Tobin University of California at Santa Barbara)
Noël Valis (Yale University)
Supporting Scholarship, Quality, and Access
Junior scholars still are generally required to publish a monograph, and increasingly show progress towards a second book, according to the MLA’s 2006 Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. Yet the economics of scholarly publishing have compelled university presses to curtail publishing in some areas of the humanities where readership is small and sales are reduced, including the foreign language fields.
Sales alone cannot be the driver of academic scholarship. University presses were founded to support publishing that had limited commercial value. Penn State Romance Studies, re-commissions a previously discontinued series with three aims:
- Publish scholarship of the highest quality.
- Support academic fields that have limited publication outlets.
- Experiment with business and access models that will provide sustainable support for scholarly monograph publishing and increase engagement with research publications.
All books chosen for publication in Penn State Romance Studies undergo full peer review, ensuring the same commitment to quality as with any other university press series. By making publications available simultaneously in both electronic open access format and via print, the series will be accessible to scholars and general readers throughout the world.
As a collaborative project at Penn State, the series brings together the complementary strengths of the Press, the Libraries, The Department of French and Francophone Studies, and The Department of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The Press will contribute its expertise in peer review, content development, design and production, and marketing. The Libraries bring expertise in technology, collection development, and archiving. The two academic departments provide scholarly support in the form of an editorial board that solicits and reviews potential series books.