The Journal of Human Resources Welcomes New Editor

This post was originally published on the Journal of Human Resources blog


A photograph of Anna Aizer

The Journal of Human Resources is pleased to welcome Anna Aizer as editor. Anna Aizer is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics department at Brown University. She joined Brown in 2003 after graduating from UCLA in 2002 and completing a postdoc at Princeton. She is codirector of the Children’s program at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been coeditor at the JHR since 2015.

She is a trained health economist and the focus of her work is understanding the high rates of intergenerational transmission of poverty in the US. Her work has been funded by the NIH and the NSF and has been published in the Journal of Human Resources, the American Economic ReviewScience, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

The editor directs the peer review process, appoints coeditors and associate editors, and leads the journal in terms of content, sound peer review and editorial practice, and policy. The editorial board and journal staff extend their thanks and best wishes to Editor Aizer as she serves in this leadership role.


A picture of the cover of Journal of Human Resources volume 56 number 4, with a link to the journal's website.

The Journal of Human Resources is among the leading journals in empirical microeconomics. Intended for scholars, policy makers, and practitioners, each issue examines research in a variety of fields, including labor economics, development economics, health economics, and the economics of education, discrimination, and retirement. Founded in 1965, the Journal of Human Resources features articles that make scientific contributions in research relevant to public policy practitioners.

Monatshefte Editor Receives Award for Teaching, Research, and Service

Sabine Gross, book review editor of Monatshefte

Sabine Gross, book review editor of UW Press–published journal Monatshefte, has received a prestigious Hilldale Award for her research, teaching, and service as the Griebsch Bascom Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In a press release announcing the award, Gross is praised for “brilliant interdisciplinary scholarship” in the areas of poetry, theater, literary analysis, and philosophy, as well as her “innovative and inspiring teaching.”

Gross’s contributions to Monatshefte mirror the high level of commitment and excellence celebrated by this award. For two decades she has overseen the journal’s robust book review section, which can include up to twenty-five reviews per issue. For a journal published on a quarterly basis, this represents a tremendous feat.

On receiving this honor, Gross says, “Being part of the UW community and working with great colleagues has been the foundation for all I’ve done here, including my position as Monatshefte book review editor, which connects me with hundreds of colleagues nationally and internationally every year.”

Now on its 113th volume, Monatshefte has appeared continuously since 1899 and has been published at UW–Madison since 1927. For a sample of Gross’s interdisciplinary interests, see the most recent issue, which is focused on the theme of rhythm. Gross coedited this special issue with Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge, and their introduction is freely available to read.

Ecological Restoration Editor Named ESA Fellow

Steven N. Handel, editor of Ecological Restoration

Congratulations to Steven N. Handel, editor of UW Press published journal Ecological Restoration, who has been named a 2021 Fellow by the Ecological Society of America. ESA Fellows are recognized for outstanding contributions related to ecological knowledge and are elected for life. Handel was chosen for “contributions in urban restoration ecology, including research on opportunities and methods for adding ecological enhancements to degraded areas; for building important bridges to the landscape architecture profession in prize-winning public projects; and for revising university curricula to better incorporate ecological concepts into landscape design practices.”

On receiving this honor, Handel says:

I am so grateful for this wonderful Fellow award from the ESA. Restoration ecologists learn many things, but we have neither the training nor legal license to actually draw blueprints. For that we must closely collaborate with landscape architects and planners. I have tried to build that link in my writing, public speaking, and university teaching. As editor of Ecological Restoration, I encourage landscape architects to publish their concepts with us, then ask working ecologists to critique those plans. We publish the critiques. I also write editorials in every issue that champion this transdisciplinary thinking. In these ways, we are trying to mesh the thinking of two professions and create a more ecological future for us all.

Handel is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He has served as editor of Ecological Restoration since 2011, and his incisive commentary on the state of restoration science can be found in each issue’s editorial section, freely available to read. His latest editorial is entitled “Black and White, and Green,” and considers the connections between racism and environmental degradation.

Announcing the Results of the Wisconsin Poetry Prize Competition

Out of over 950 entrants, Daniel Khalastchi has been selected as the winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and Joshua Nguyen has been named the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Each will receive $1,000, and their collections will be published this fall by the University of Wisconsin Press. Judith Vollmer has been awarded the Four Lakes Poetry Prize; her collection will be published next spring along with finalist collections by Emily Rose Cole and Laura Villareal.

Carmen Giménez Smith, editor of The Nation’s poetry section and codirector of CantoMundo, served as this year’s contest judge. Her collections include National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Milk and Filth (2010) and Be Recorder (2020), which was shortlisted for both the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award.

Photo by Barry Phipps. Picture of Daniel Khalastchi with long curly hair and beard, wearing dark-rimmed glasses and navy jacket, sitting in a Herman Miller chair and looking seriously at the camera.

Daniel Khalastchi is the author of Manoleria and Tradition. A former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Daniel earned his MFA from the University of Iowa, where he currently directs the Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The Rumpus, Poetry Northwest, and The Iowa Review. Giménez Smith praises the Brittingham-winning volume, “When the world is turned upside down, when vaccines are 5G and democracy is fascism and insurrection is freedom of speech, satire is often the most acute mirror to interpret an age. Vivid, bleak, and startling, American Parables is an allegorical masterpiece of mordant irony I plan to carry with me in this uncertain post-JAN6 era.”

Photo by Elisa J. Fuhrken of Joshua Nguyen with dark spiked up hair wearing two-tone black and clear framed glasses, wearing a gray shirt with a tan corduroy jacket, standing in a green woodsy area, looking into the camera and laughing.

Joshua Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American writer from Houston. He received his MFA from the University of Mississippi, where he is currently pursuing his PhD. His work has been published in The Texas Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Come Clean, winner of the Felix Pollak prize, is his first full-length collection. Giménez Smith says, “I am so deeply moved by the subdued lyric force of this collection, if only subdued could capture the elegant control Nguyen exerts on his line. Sensuously constructed, in Come Clean he looks at the vast landscape of history through the desire for Marie Kondo’s order and a cure for imposter’s syndrome, in a book that’s as current as it is timeless.”

Judith Vollmer pictured with gray hair streaked elegantly with white, wearing a pair of cat-eyed black glasses and a white shirt, looking at the camera and smiling.

Judith Vollmer is the author of five previous collections, including The Apollonia Poems, which won the Four Lakes Prize four years ago. Her winning collection, The Sound Boat, features new and selected poems from her earlier volumes. Her writing has appeared in Poetry International, The Women’s Review of Books, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor emerita of English at the University of Pittsburgh–Greensburg and teaches in the MFA Program at Carlow University. According to Lawrence Joseph, “From the deeply moral and radical qualities of her first book to spectacular new poems, Vollmer has created a body of work singular in American poetry. With the sense, intellect, sound, tone, rhythm and music only the most real and truest poetry provides, The Sound Boat embodies, on every level, the regions of the human soul.”

Black and white photograph of Emily Rose Cole with long hair parted deeply wearing a black v-neck t-shirt and a delicate silver chain necklace, smiling and seated, looking to the right and into the camera.

Emily Rose Cole will also have her collection, Thunderhead, published as part of the series. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is a PhD candidate in poetry with an emphasis in disability studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Poet Lore, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. Judy Jordan praises Thunderhead, saying, “Fiercely imaginative, these heart-wrenching, lyric narrative poems are haunted by the body as a depository for trauma, the body with cancer, the body with MS, the body cut open and sacrificed, teaching us that grief comes from love while transforming us with exquisite and beautiful language that is simply breathtaking.”

Photo of Laura Villareal with dark long hair parted to the side, wearing large tortoise shell rimmed glasses on the bridge of her nose, wearing a pale yellow shirt and light blue overalls. She is smiling at the camera and standing next to an orange fruit tree with green leaves.

Girl’s Guide to Leaving is the forthcoming collection by Laura Villareal, a Stadler Fellow and a National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critic. She earned her MFA from Rutgers University-Newark and her writing has appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Giménez Smith says, “A folklore troubadour, Villareal ably unfolds a path through memory. Running wild and running home, this guide isn’t just for leaving but rather for making space in sites where one can ‘witness local miracles’ or to tell a heroine’s story without remorse. This is a rangy and ambitious book I can’t wait to see in print.”

Submissions for the next competition will be accepted between July 15 and September 15, 2021.

About the University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press is a not-for-profit publisher of books and journals. With nearly 1,500 titles and over 8,000 peer-reviewed articles in print, its mission embodies the Wisconsin Idea by publishing work of distinction that serves the people of Wisconsin and the world.

For more information on the Wisconsin Poetry Prizes, please visit https://uwpress.wisc.edu/series/wi-poetry.html

A Celebration of Turkish-German Writer Aras Ören

The most recent issue of Monatshefte, a special issue dedicated to Aras Ören, is now available. Guest editor Ela Gezen gives a brief summary of the issue below.


An actor, playwright, novelist, poet, theorist, and radio journalist, Aras Ören (1939–) is one of the earliest and most significant contributors to the emergence of Turkish-German literature. He had his literary breakthrough in 1973, with the publication of the first part of his highly acclaimed Berlin trilogy: Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße [What Does Niyazi Want in Naunyn Street]. Ören has been a regular participant in a variety of cultural events and also an important public figure in his role as editor for the first regular Turkish-language radio programming in (West) Germany. This special issue brings Aras Ören’s literary oeuvre as well as cultural-political contributions to the fore, while also highlighting their continued significance. It features well-known scholars from a variety of institutional and national contexts, and not only offers new approaches to Ören’s work, but also includes selected first-time English translations expanding his readership and therefore providing opportunities for inclusion into the English-language classroom. At the same time this special issue draws attention to the extensive archive, Ören’s Vorlaß at the Akademie der Künste, which not only includes documents relevant to his own work, but also his collection of materials on Turkish-German cultural activities and events in (West) Berlin since the 1970s.


To learn more, browse the table of contents and read the introduction (in German), freely available now.

Call for Papers: Colonial Histories of Plant-Based Pharmaceuticals

Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection: The Munsong cinchona plantation, Kalimpong, Bengal, India: a woman in traditional Bengali dress holds a circular tray of cinchona seeds (the plant of which is used to produce the anti-malarial drug quinine), which are planted by the Bengali man next to her. Photograph, 1905/1920 (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/u3vcd8uy).

History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, the official journal of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP), is pleased to announce a call for papers for a special issue: “Colonial Histories of Plant-Based Pharmaceuticals.” The issue will appear as volume 63, number 2 of HoPP (Winter 2021). Guest editors for the special issue will be Dr. Geoff Bil and Dr. Jaipreet Virdi, both of the University of Delaware.

Submission Guidelines

To submit a proposal for the special issue, please send a 200-word abstract and 1-page CV to guest editors Geoff Bil (gbil@udel.edu) and Jaipreet Virdi (jvirdi@udel.edu) by January 31, 2021. Invitations for manuscript submission of 8,000 words will be sent by February 6, 2021, with first drafts due April 15, 2021, for peer review. Please consult the full HoPP author guidelines when preparing manuscripts.

Call for Papers

Plants and their medicinal properties have been used for healing since time immemorial. Plant-based pharmacopoeias have generated local, regional, and global systems of production, distribution, and consumption; defined trade relations across borders; and even accompanied exchanges of bodies and technologies. Scholars have examined, for instance, how the circulation and consumption of plants and pharmaceuticals were generated within deeply inequitable systems of colonization, with the accompanying exploitation, suppression, and erasure of ancestral knowledges. Within these contexts, the very definition of plants as medicines—as opposed to foods, taxonomical specimens, symbols or ornaments—is frequently unstable, shaped by language, culture, empire, and ecological context, and subject to contingent understandings of the body, physiology, illness, and treatment. While the rise of synthetic and chemical pharmaceuticals has inadvertently positioned herbalist approaches as “alternative” healing systems in the Western world, phytomedicines have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years as complementary forms of treatment, even while they constitute 80 percent of pharmacopoeias in the Global South. Increased demand, coupled with ecological destruction wrought by climate change, have furthermore depleted crucial plant resources, thereby threatening Indigenous ways of life. 

What are the cultural and epistemological tensions between plant-based pharmaceuticals and synthetic biomedicines? How have medicinal plants figured in colonial relationships? This special issue of History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals aims to reframe histories of phytomedicines through intersecting approaches from the history of medicine, pharmacy, and pharmacology with postcolonial, Indigenous, and gender studies, histories of science and empire, labor history, environmental history, and related fields.

We seek papers on themes including, but not limited to, the following: 

  • Colonial histories of medicinal plants as examined through Indigenous and local histories
  • “Medical quackery” reframed through new histories of plant-based pharmaceuticals 
  • Workers and labor histories, including intersections with disability and industry
  • Gender, sexuality, and medicinal plant knowledges
  • Global and/or imperial consumption and distribution patterns 
  • Phytomedicines and colonial encounters in the Global South 
  • Plant-based approaches for chronic diseases, disability, and health maintenance
  • Effects of climate change and ecological factors on medicinal plant resources
  • Bioprospecting, patenting, and anti-colonial resistance
  • Medicinal plants in translation

Landscape Journal Welcomes New Interim Editor

Landscape Journal, the official journal of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA), is excited to welcome a new interim editor. Katherine Melcher succeeds previous interim editor Robert Corry and assistant editor David Pitt. The UW Press would like to thank Corry and Pitt for all their hard work on behalf of the journal over the past year. The following is a brief introduction to the new editor.


Katherine Melcher is an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design, where she teaches courses in community design, site engineering, and research methods. Her research interests span two areas: landscape architecture theory and social aspects of design, with a special focus on participatory design. Her work has been published in Landscape Journal, Landscape Review, Landscape Research Record, Town Planning Review, The Plan Journal, and New Geographies. Her piece in Landscape Research Record, “Three Moments in Aesthetic Discourse,” received the Outstanding Paper Award from the Council of Educators of Landscape Architecture in 2018.

She co-edited the book Community-Built: Art, Construction, Preservation, and Place, published by Routledge in 2017, and served as co-editor of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts’ newsletter from 2017 to 2019. In addition to teaching research methods at the University of Georgia, she has supervised the research of over twenty-five master students.

Prior to joining the University of Georgia, she was Design Director at Urban Ecology, a nonprofit based in the San Francisco Bay Area that specializes in community-based design. She developed participatory processes that engaged diverse communities in the design and creation of their public places, including the East Bay Greenway, a twelve-mile pedestrian and bicycle path in Alameda County, CA. The California Chapter of the American Planning Association awarded the East Bay Greenway Concept Plan its 2009 Focused Issue Award of Excellence.

Originally from Oklahoma, she received her BA in sociology from Vassar College and her MLA from Louisiana State University. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

On her new role with Landscape Journal, Melcher says,

I am excited about the opportunity to engage directly with landscape scholars to help further our understanding of how we can best plan, design, and manage our environments. I would especially like to thank Robert Corry and David Pitt for taking so much time and care to introduce me to the editing process. Because of their work, I believe the transition will be smooth. I also would like to thank Dan Nadenicek and Ashley Steffens for encouraging me to take on this role.


To learn more about Melcher’s work, see her 2013 article in Landscape Journal entitled “Equity, Empowerment, or Participation: Prioritizing Goals in Community Design,” which is freely available to read until the end of January.

The Social Cost of Water Pollution

The most recent issue of Land Economics, a special issue entitled “Integrated Assessment Models and the Social Cost of Water Pollution,” is now available. The papers in this issue stem from a 2019 workshop organized by David Keiser, Catherine L. Kling, and Daniel J. Phaneuf. Read an excerpt from the introduction to the issue, written by the organizers.


The eight papers in this issue were presented at a workshop titled Integrated Assessment Models and the Social Cost of Water Pollution. The event took place on April 3–5, 2019, at Cornell University. This was the second annual workshop, part of an ongoing effort to understand how changes in water quality affect society, with the ultimate goal of providing estimates of the “social costs” of water pollution that are useful for policy analysis across broad spatial scales. This requires moving beyond economic case studies, emphasizing instead multidisciplinary research operating at large spatial scales and involving economists, ecologists, hydrologists, and related disciplines. It also requires coordination with state and federal agencies, NGOs, and other stakeholders to provide tools that have both scientific rigor and practical usefulness. The workshop brought together academic economists, ecologists, hydrologists, and agricultural engineers; agency scientists and policy experts; individuals from private sector institutes; and students to hear talks, participate in discussions, and build foundations for future collaborations.

The reference to integrated assessment models (IAMs) in the workshop title serves to emphasize the scale of ambition for this research community. An IAM is a collection of modules that individually describe the components of a complex system and work together to understand how the overall system works. Disciplinary specialists contribute their own expertise to build the IAM components and also cooperate with other researchers to assure that the components are compatible. Estimating the social costs of water pollution involves linking the sources of water pollution with their fate and transport in waterways, their impact on downstream ecosystem services, and changes in economic value or costs among affected populations. This requires the expertise of hydrologists, ecologists, and economists, respectively.

The specific papers are examples of progress to date. They include a mix of IAMs focused on predicting the economic benefits from improved water quality, IAMs looking at the costs of achieving pollution reduction objects, and studies that explore specific components needed for integrated assessment. The applications span locations and spatial scales, such as iconic water bodies and their surroundings (Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes), a state-level analysis focused on Michigan, a river basin scale application to the Republican River in Kansas/Nebraska, individual watersheds in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, and a nationwide application. Collectively the studies illustrate the range of research tasks, challenges, and products that define the agenda of research on the social costs of water pollution.


To learn more, browse the table of contents and read the open access article “Including Additional Pollutants into an Integrated Assessment Model for Estimating Nonmarket Benefits from Water Quality” by Robert Griffin, Adrian Vogl, Stacie Wolny, Stefanie Covino, Eivy Monroy, Heidi Ricci, Richard Sharp, Courtney Schmidt, and Emi Uchida.

UW Press book receives NEH Open Book Award

Cover image shows a portrait of Sofia wearing a brown fur hat, green jacket, yellow collared shirt, and maroon tiee.

We are pleased to share that Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia by Adele Lindenmeyr is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Humanities Open Book Award, a special initiative for scholarly presses to make recent monographs freely available online.

“I am very grateful to both the University of Wisconsin Press and the NEH. This grant ensures that my story of one of the 20th century’s most remarkable women will reach a wider readership,” says Lindenmeyr.

Books on a wide range of topics, written with previous support from one of many NEH fellowship programs, will be made available through this award. Per the organization, “During a time when so many of us are doing research remotely, the value of digital editions like these that can be freely accessed from anywhere in the world is more apparent than ever. All awardees will receive $5,500 per book to support digitization, marketing, and a stipend for the author.”

Our warmest congratulations to Adele, and all involved!

University Press Week 2020 Friday Blog Tour: #RaiseUP Active Voices

Happy University Press Week 2020! Continue the blog tour by visiting these great offerings that illuminate how university presses raise up active voices: