The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) is delighted to announce the official launch of its Open Access programme. Our current OA publications include a number of titles which may be of interest to this list (see below).
MHRA is a charity, founded in 1918 and governed by working scholars. It funds scholarships and fellowships: this year, that includes funding for a UCFL Postdoctoral Researcher, a position in academic policy-making to support the modern languages. (Applications are now open.) But it is probably best known as a publisher. MHRA publishes a suite of journals, the Style Guide (streamlined and clarified as the new Fourth Edition, 2024), and two major book imprints. Legenda carries new research in modern languages, including English studies, while Texts and Translations releases scholarly editions and translations.
In June 2024, MHRA is taking significant steps towards Open Access. We have set our Gold OA processing fee for books at £5K + VAT, substantially below the UKRI ceiling of £10K. Our book contracts are arranged to give authors as much flexibility as possible, so that they can take advantage (or not) at their option. Two Gold OA books are already published in Legenda, with more on the way. For details and FAQ, see the OA hub at: https://www.mhra.org.uk/open
We use OA ourselves to forward our charitable aims. This year the Style Guide went under a Creative Commons licence for the first time, as did the journal Working Papers in the Humanities. We are also reviving 30 classic monographs, published between 1970 and 1990 in the Texts and Dissertations series. These titles have for many years been difficult to obtain, but readers must still want them, since we receive frequent trade enquiries on behalf of would-be buyers. Rather than reissue them for sale, we’ve used our own funds to publish them as Open Access ebooks which are free to read, download and even re-use. For example, if you would like to post a copy on a lecture course website as background reading material, that requires no permission from us.
More are coming, but this first batch of 30 already has something for everybody. David Constantine’s study of Hölderlin, and James Kearns’s book on the Symbolist poets in the Paris art scene, to name only two, are models of the elegant, readable monograph. Studies such as David Gillespie’s look at the Soviet novelist Valentin Rasputin, or Christina Howells’s on Jean-Paul Sartre, show us major figures of the past as they seemed when still living.
New titles on Open Access today:
Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence, by Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug and Giuliana Pieri (2024)
Spatial Violence and the Documentary Image, by Patrick Brian Smith (2024)
A selection of revivals now free to read:
Language and Style in a Renaissance Epic: Berni’s Corrections to Boiardo’s ’Orlando Innamorato’, by H. F. Woodhouse (1982)
Les Enseignements de Théodore Paléologue, by Christine Knowles (1983)
Vaugelas and the Development of the French Language, by Wendy Ayres-Bennett (1987)
The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza: With Special Reference to his Place in Paduan Humanism, by R. G. G. Mercer (1979)
Quevedo on Parnassus: Allusive Context and Literary Theory in the Love-Lyric, by Paul Julian Smith (1987)
Sent on behalf of the MHRA.