ASA gossip

I was talking with an editor from NYU Press at the ASA conference this weekend, and he told me something interesting. The press is going to be starting a new series in nineteenth-century American literature that will be funded, in some part, by the Mellon Foundation. According to the editor, an announcement about this will be made at or around MLA this year. He said that Mellon is deeply worried about the effect that the contraction of publishing is having on literary studies, and this is one of the ways that they are trying to ameliorate the situation. Our conversation was cut off, so I didn't get the chance to ask whether Mellon was funding other such series in other fields at other presses. Regardless, this is a development worth paying attention to.

Updtate: Pat Cahill just passed on to me this link to a Chronicle article about the Mellon program, which definitely suggests that it will involve multiple fields.