Publishing Your First Book in the Humanities (With Thoughts on the Second)

Alan Thomas is editorial director at the University of Chicago Press, where he oversees the selection of 270 books annually and acquires books in the humanities, with a focus on literary studies. Since beginning work as an editor at Chicago in 1985, he has published over 800 books, including winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Modern Language Association’s Lowell Prize, and Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award. Authors he has published in recent years include Dipesh Chakrabarty, Teju Cole, Amitav Ghosh, Alice Kaplan, Toril Moi, Marjorie Perloff, and Susan Stewart. Closer to home, he is proud to have published at least eight books by members of the Michigan English department, most recently Jonathan Freeman’s The Jewish Decadence. Alan’s recent initiatives at Chicago include the Thinking Literature series, edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian, and a relaunch of Chicago’s venerable Phoenix Poets series under the editorship of Srikanth Reddy. Alan’s writings and photographs have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Design Observer, Places Journal, and in his 2018 photobook 55x5, published by Marquand Editions.