Peter Lang (publisher)

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter Lang has built a backlist that runs past forty thousand books, all in the humanities and social sciences. Yet it has never become a household name outside academic circles. That kind of scale raises real questions. Three questions frame what follows: where the house began, how it expanded into new markets, and how far its operations reach today. The answers trace back to a founder, a subsidiary opened an ocean away, and a shelf of academic journals that keeps growing.

• 2. The Founder's Name

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  In 1970, a Swiss editor named Peter Lang founded the publishing house in Frankfurt am Main and gave it his own name. In 1982, the company opened an American subsidiary called Peter Lang Publishing USA. That subsidiary focused on textbooks for classroom use in education, media and communication, and Black studies, along with scholarly monographs. That move into the United States marked the company's first expansion beyond Europe, well before its current spread across further continents.

• 3. Reach And Catalogue

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  Lausanne, Switzerland now serves as Peter Lang's headquarters, with additional offices in Berlin, Brussels, Chennai, New York, and Oxford. From those locations, the company publishes more than 1,100 academic titles every year, released in both print and digital formats. Its complete online journals collection is hosted on a platform called Ingentaconnect, while its digital textbooks reach readers worldwide through a separate distributor, Kortext. Across all of that output, the company organizes its list into twelve distinct subject areas. That journal collection includes titles current and lapsed, some of which have found new publishers over the years.

• 4. The Journal List

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  Twenty-two academic journals currently carry the Peter Lang name. Not every journal the company has published has stayed with it. Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques, a journal that once appeared under the Peter Lang imprint, is now published by De Gruyter Brill. New issues keep appearing under those 22 titles, a reminder that even long-established academic publishers keep reshaping their catalogues year to year.