Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

• 1. Introduction

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  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press was born out of an unlikely partnership between a university founder and a publisher who had just walked away from one of the most prestigious academic presses in America. In 1967, Peter Sammartino, the man who built Fairleigh Dickinson University into New Jersey's largest private university, joined forces with Thomas Yoseloff to launch something new. Yoseloff had only recently left his post as director of the University of Pennsylvania Press. He had a vision: not just one press, but a whole network of them. What drew Sammartino and Yoseloff together, what that network became, and how a small press in New Jersey ended up moving to Vancouver are questions worth sitting with.

• 2. A Network Is Born

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  Thomas Yoseloff left the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1966 to found Associated University Presses, which he designed as a consortium of small-to-medium-sized university presses. The idea was to create a shared infrastructure for publishers of humanities scholarship who might otherwise struggle alone. FDU Press joined that consortium in 1968, becoming its very first participating member. That founding relationship shaped how the press operated for decades. When AUP ceased most new publishing in 2010, FDU Press had to find a new distribution partner, and it turned to Rowman & Littlefield to carry its books forward.

• 3. Editorial Stewardship

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  Charles Angoff served as chief editor of FDU Press from 1967 to 1977, guiding the press through its first decade. Harry Keyishian then took over as director in 1977 and held that role until 2017, a span of forty years that made him one of the longest-serving figures in the press's history. Keyishian remains on the editorial committee today. James Gifford is the current director. That committee is deliberately composed of faculty drawn from multiple university campuses, sitting alongside an advisory board that reaches outside FDU entirely to include publishing professionals.

• 4. Vancouver and Beyond

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  In July 2017, FDU Press relocated to Fairleigh Dickinson University's Vancouver campus, marking a geographic shift that took the press across an international border. Despite that move, the editorial committee stayed intact, still drawing on faculty from the university's various campuses. The press's distribution story continued to evolve when Rowman & Littlefield was acquired by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2024. FDU Press formalized a new partnership with Bloomsbury effective June 2024, connecting a press with roots in 1967 New Jersey to one of the major forces in contemporary academic publishing. By that point, the press had issued over 1,500 non-fiction and research titles, concentrated in literature, literary criticism, arts, history, and the social sciences.