Academic Studies Press

• 1. Introduction

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  Academic Studies Press had spent years building a catalog of Ukrainian translations. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine brought renewed interest to those books. The independent scholarly press, based in Boston, Massachusetts, had been operating since its founding in 2007. Its identity took shape around two fields that larger houses often left to specialists: Jewish studies and Slavic studies. From there, the press reached into religious studies, comparative literature, and history. What drew this small Boston house toward some of the most politically charged scholarship of recent decades? And how did it build a list that would eventually stretch from medieval Jewish philosophy to contemporary Ukrainian war poetry?

• 2. Scholars and Translations

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  Jacob Neusner, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Maxim D. Shrayer are among the scholars who have published with Academic Studies Press. The list also includes David Berger, Menachem Kellner, Viktor Zhivov, Jerold Auerbach, Ellendea Proffer Teasley, and Geoffrey Alderman. The translation catalog extends to historical figures as well, among them Maimonides, Ahad Ha'am, Mordecai Kaplan, Eliezer Schweid, and Yury Tynyanov.

  In 2018, the press published the first authorized English-language translation of Akram Aylisli's controversial novella Stone Dreams. The press's titles have won awards from the Jewish Book Council, the Modern Language Association, AATSEEL, and the Koffler Centre of the Arts. Reading lists published by Mosaic and The Washington Post have also featured its books.

• 3. Words for War

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  In 2017, Academic Studies Press collaborated with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. The collaboration produced Words for War, an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry. Among those featured in the anthology were Serhiy Zhadan and Ilya Kaminsky, whose poems and commentary the volume collects. Also in 2017, the press received NEH funding to create freely accessible e-books for 42 seminal titles in Russian literary and cultural history. That digital initiative put those texts within reach of readers at no cost.

• 4. Journals and Partnerships

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  Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, edited by Joseph Carroll, is among the three peer-reviewed academic journals the press publishes. A second is the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, which has been edited since 2018 by Lesley Klaff. In 2018, the Algemeiner Journal named Klaff to its list of the top 100 people positively influencing Jewish life. The recognition cited her role as the journal's editor-in-chief. In 2020, the press launched a fourth peer-reviewed journal, Latin American Jewish Studies, on behalf of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association. The press has also served as distributor and printer for books published by Touro College Press since 2012. In 2019, it entered an e-book distribution partnership with Walter de Gruyter, a German academic publisher.