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Donald E. Hall offers a self-help book designed for academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty. He helps readers engage in an active process of career management, goal setting, prioritization, and reflection on the norms that constitute what he calls “academic selfhood.” Drawing broadly on the insights of Anthony Giddens’ notions of reflexivity and self-identity, Hall encourages new and seasoned scholars to “own up to” the behaviors, attitudes, and complicities that compromise their professional identities. This book couples all its exhortations with clear, concrete, and practical strategies for responding productively to the many uncertainties of academic life.

Separate chapters of the book examine the textuality of the academic self, profession, academic processes and collegiality. Among the topics candidly discussed are careerism, burnout, procrastination, and insecurity. Throughout the book readers will find anecdotes, real-life examples, and concrete tips for constructing and maintaining a successful career defined on their own terms.

The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual opens up a new and frank discussion on academic life and academics’ basic responsibility for their own actions and attitudes.

Those who teach college students have extensive training in their disciplines, but unlike their counterparts at the high school or elementary school level, they often have surprisingly little instruction in the craft of teaching itself.  The Chicago Handbook for Teachers, Second Edition, is an extraordinarily helpful guide for anyone facing the daunting challenge of putting together a course and delivering it successfully.

Representing teachers at all stages of their careers, the authors, including distinguished historian Alan Brinkley, offer practical advice for almost any situation a new teacher might face, from preparing a syllabus to managing classroom dynamics. Beginning with a nuts and bolts plan for designing a course, the handbook also explains how to lead a discussion, evaluate your own teaching, give an effective lecture, supervise students' writing and research, create and grade exams, and more.

This new edition is thoroughly revised for contemporary concerns, with updated coverage on the use of electronic resources and on the challenge of creating and sustaining an inclusive classroom. A new chapter on science education and new coverage of the distinctive issues faced by adjunct faculty broaden the book’s audience considerably. The addition of sample teaching materials in the appendixes enhances the practical, hands-on focus of the second edition. Its broad scope and wealth of specific tips will make The Chicago Handbook for Teachers useful both as a comprehensive guide for beginning educators and a reference manual for experienced instructors.

Why should Hudson Strode matter to readers today? Because his life was a masterclass in reinvention and a backstage pass to the Jazz Age’s wittiest salons. Strode wasn’t just a professor in Tuscaloosa; he was a cultural impresario who turned a modest Southern life into a global adventure. He taught generations of writers, staged Shakespeare with bravura, and wrote travel books that earned him a knighthood from the King of Sweden.

But the real allure? The gossip. Strode dined with Lady Astor, traded quips with H. L. Mencken, and sipped cocktails with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald when they were the incandescent couple of the 1920s. He met Hemingway in Cuba, Robinson Jeffers in Carmel, and Isak Dinesen in Denmark—then wrote about them with candor and charm. His memoir brims with stories of literary giants, royal encounters, and the occasional eyebrow-raising escapade (ask him about the brothel in Birmingham).

For contemporary readers, The Eleventh House is both a captivating autobiography and a time capsule of ambition, art, and audacity. Strode’s world—where Southern gentility collided with European modernism and Jazz Age excess—feels startlingly relevant in an era obsessed with reinvention and celebrity culture. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to gossip with the Fitzgeralds or watch the devil admire himself in a porch mirror, this memoir delivers.

Step inside Hudson Strode’s The Eleventh House. It’s witty, worldly, and just scandalous enough to keep you turning pages.

This edited collection, the first in the Practices & Possibilities series to be published in its Voices from the Field section, offers a rich set of narratives by writing instructors who are serving or have worked in contingent positions. Intended for anyone considering a career in the humanities, The Invisible Professor seeks to reach individuals in three phases of their careers: those thinking of entering the profession, those knee-deep in it and looking for ways to improve conditions, and those who have vacated academic positions for more humane alternative tracks.

As academia comes to a crossroads, with a disheartening shift towards a more disposable business model, multiple solutions are desperately needed. Faculty members in contingent positions are the new faculty majority on college campuses, and they are most likely the first professors students will meet. They deserve respect and a livable wage.

President of the Archaeological Institute of America, professor at the University of Michigan from 1889 to 1927, and president of the American Philological Association, Francis Kelsey was crucially involved in the founding or growth of major educational institutions. He came to maturity in a period of great technological change in communications, transportation, and manufacturing. Kelsey took full advantage of such innovations in his ceaseless drive to promote education for all, to further the expansion of knowledge, and to champion the benefits of the study of antiquity.

A vigorous traveler around the United States, Europe, and the Mediterranean, Kelsey strongly believed in the value of personally viewing sites ancient and modern and collecting artifacts that could be used by the new museums and universities that were springing up in the United States. This collecting habit put him in touch with major financiers of the day, including Charles Freer, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, as he sought their help for important projects.

Drawing heavily on Kelsey's daily diaries now held at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library, John Griffiths Pedley gives us a biography that records the wide-ranging activities of a gifted and energetic scholar whose achievements mirrored the creative and contributive innovations of his contemporary Americans.

In 2001, the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program began awarding five-year grants to colleges and universities to address a common problem: how to improve the work environment for women faculty in science and engineering. Drawing on the expertise of scientists, engineers, social scientists, specialists in organizational behavior, and university administrators, this collection is the first to describe the variety of innovative efforts academic institutions around the country have undertaken.

Focusing on a wide range of topics, from how to foster women's academic success in small teaching institutions, to how to use interactive theater to promote faculty reflection about departmental culture, to how a particular department created and maintained a healthy climate for women's scientific success, the contributors discuss both the theoretical and empirical aspects of the initiatives, with emphasis on the practical issues involved in creating these approaches. The resulting evidence shows that these initiatives have the desired effects. The cases represented in this collection depict the many issues women faculty in science and engineering face, and the solutions that are presented can be widely accepted at academic institutions around the United States. The essays in Transforming Science and Engineering illustrate that creating work environments that sustain and advance women scientists and engineers benefits women, men, and underrepresented minorities.

Abigail J. Stewart is Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.

Janet E. Malley is a psychologist and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan.

Danielle LaVaque-Manty, former Research Associate at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, teaches composition at U-M's Sweetland Writing Center.

Cover photo: Joanne Leonard