The Book Ends: Obermann Center and Office for the Vice President for Research’s Book Completion Workshop program provides funding and administrative support for faculty who have a mature manuscript that would benefit from collegial review. In recent years, the Obermann Center worked with Jenna Supp-Montgomerie (Communication Studies and Religious Studies, CLAS) and Jessica Welburn Paige (Sociology, CLAS) as they self-organized similar workshops. Supp-Montgomerie’s book, When the Medium Was the Mission, is now being published by NYU Press, and Welburn Paige’s work, Keep on Pushin’, is due from Columbia University Press in 2021. E Cram had the first official Book Ends workshop in May 2019.
“It was instrumental to me moving the book forward,” says E Cram (Communication Studies, CLAS) of Book Ends. Cram’s manuscript examines spaces and performances of memory in/of western lands to interpret the ongoing legacy of sexual modernity in shaping cultures of violence in the Rocky Mountain region.
The workshop paid for two visiting scholars and two UI scholars to provide revision and publishing advice, who, Cram says, “helped me think about audience and texts outside my immediate area and made invaluable suggestions for a revision plan and the proposal.” Violent Inheritance: Land, Sexuality, and the Making of the North American West was picked up by the University of California Press’s Environmental Communications, Powers, and Culture series and will be published next year.
Björn Anderson (School of Art and Art History, CLAS) also had a Book Ends workshop in Summer 2019. His book, Negotiating Identity in Nabataean Arabia, examines the intersections of cultural identity in the kingdom of Nabataea, centered at Petra in southern Jordan.
