M. E. Sharpe

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  M. E. Sharpe, Inc. began in 1958 with a very specific mission: to bring Russian social science and humanities scholarship to English-speaking readers. Myron Emanuel Sharpe, whose initials would name the press, saw a gap in what Western academics could access from behind the Iron Curtain. His answer was translation journals. What he built over the following decades grew far beyond that original mandate, drawing Nobel laureates, celebrated novelists, and scholars of Asian studies under a single imprint. How does a small translation press founded in Cold War New York become a recognized name in academic publishing across four continents of subject matter?

• 2. A Cold War Beginning

  ›

  Myron Emanuel Sharpe launched the press under a different name entirely: International Arts and Sciences Press. The Cold War context was not incidental. The press existed to translate what Soviet scholars were writing in economics, political science, and the humanities, and to put those ideas in front of readers who had no access to the original Russian. Through the 1960s, that project expanded outward. The press began covering other European languages, added English-language articles to its journals, and eventually reached further east to include Chinese and later Japanese scholarship. Each expansion reflected a conviction that academic knowledge should not stay locked behind language barriers. The firm's original home was New York City, where it operated for twelve years before making its first move.

• 3. The Move to New York's Suburbs

  ›

  After twelve years in New York City, M. E. Sharpe relocated to White Plains, New York. The next move came in 1980, when the firm settled in Armonk, New York, where its offices have remained. Armonk is a small community in Westchester County, not a traditional center of publishing activity, yet the press continued to grow from there. The 1980s brought a significant internal shift: the book division expanded substantially. By the time the firm had established itself in Armonk, it was publishing approximately 60 new titles a year. Those titles ranged across economics, business management, public administration, political science, history, and literature.

• 4. Nobel Laureates and Spartacus

  ›

  Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature, has published with M. E. Sharpe. So has Wassily Leontief, the Nobel laureate economist best known for developing input-output analysis. These are not honorary associations: both are listed among the press's authors. Howard Fast, the American novelist whose novel Spartacus became a cultural landmark, also appears on that list. Fast's presence signals something about the press's range: it was not purely a dry academic operation. The East Gate Books imprint, which M. E. Sharpe developed, became widely recognized as a leading resource in Asian Studies, channeling the press's long-standing orientation toward international and cross-cultural scholarship.

• 5. Journals and Reference Works

  ›

  Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs is among the periodicals M. E. Sharpe publishes, alongside the Journal of Management Information Systems, the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, the Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics, and Problems of Post-Communism. At the time of its peak publishing activity, the firm put out over 35 periodicals in total. In 1995, a distinct imprint called Sharpe Reference was founded to serve a different readership: high school students, undergraduates, and general readers who needed reliable reference material in American studies and global studies. The content from many of those reference sets was also made available electronically through Sharpe Online Reference, reflecting how academic publishing was beginning to shift toward digital distribution. The sale of the company to Routledge in 2014 marked the end of M. E. Sharpe as an independent press.