MQUP Authors Guide Informed Conversations

Against the backdrop of a news cycle dominated by the pandemic’s empirical impact – on health, employment, and the economy – we can clearly see the critical role the humanities play in helping us understand the lived experience found in those numbers.

As we prepare to add the Fall 2020 season to our prestigious list of books, McGill-Queen’s University Press has been honoured to support our current roster of authors who are guiding intelligent discussion during this unprecedented time.

The scholars we publish have expanded public conversation, on everything from hygiene to pursuing facts in a post-truth era, through a variety of media outlets. If you’re looking to dig deeper into the issues that confront us, here is a list of recent reviews, editorials, and interviews inspired by MQUP titles.

W. George Lovell, author of Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala, Fourth Edition: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500-1821, was interviewed on the American Geographical Society Podcast where he discussed his research on epidemics in the Columbian-era Americas.

Ryan Alford, author of forthcoming Seven Absolute Rights: Recovering the Historical Foundations of Canada’s Rule of Law, discusses the potential loss of civil liberties during the COVID-19 outbreak in Canada on The Agenda with Steven Palkin.

A review of Santiago Zabala’s Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts in the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses the importance of keeping a fact-based hold on the emergencies that we are otherwise encouraged to ignore.

Laurence B. Mussio, author of Whom Fortune Favours: The Bank of Montreal and the Rise of North American Finance, co-authored the Toronto Star article “Precedents can help us understand this unprecedented crisis” on five main insights gleaned from business history.

CBC’s Ideas with Nahlah Ayed interviewed Todd Dufresne, author of The Democracy of Suffering: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, Philosophy in the Anthropocene, about new ways of thinking about how collective action matters in an uncertain future.

Dufresne has also given a two-part interview with Epilogue Magazine. Part 1 – Pandemic as Prophecy? explores Covid-19, climate Change, and the future, while Part 2 – Shifting Consciousness asks whether empathy can save us from ourselves.

Historian Peter Ward, author of The Clean Body: A Modern History, was interviewed by Vox on the social history of handwashing as well as by NPR’s On Point.

The Globe & Mail has published an editorial by Mark Kingwell, author of Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface, on the ways in which the boredom of life in quarantine can lead to wisdom.

Pat Armstrong, co-author with Susan Day of Wash, Wear, and Care: Clothing and Laundry in Long-Term Residential Care, was interviewed on CBC’s The Sunday Edition about elderly care and how this moment is an opportunity “to think about how we can organize nursing homes so that people can flourish in them – not just survive.”

Shelley Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer, editors of Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions, discuss museums in the time of COVID-19 in their post “Curatorial Dreaming in the Age of COVID-19” featured on the American Alliance of Museums website.

E.A. Heaman, author of Tax, Order and Good Government and co-editor of forthcoming Who Pays for Canada?: Taxes and Fairness, reflects on historical crises and the opportunity for tax innovation in an interview with CBC’s Don Pittis.

If you’re finally joining the bread-making wave of isolation baking, but don’t have any yeast, Laura Brehaut explores a salt-rising recipe from Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas’ Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic.

For more from the MQUP Spring 2020 Catalogue >

For more from the MQUP Fall 2020 Catalogue >