About Amherst College Press

Amherst College Press produces pathbreaking, peer-reviewed scholarship and makes it available to readers everywhere as digital, open-access work. The press publishes titles in Art History and Visual Studies, Latin American Studies, Literary Studies, Music and Sound Studies, and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies with a deep interest in interdisciplinary scholarship. We publish our books on Fulcrum, a platform created by University of Michigan Publishing, allowing narrative to be richly integrated with multimedia and optimized for long-term preservation and accessibility.

Amherst College Press is a member of the Association of University Presses and is fully funded by Amherst College.

Editorial Board

The Editorial Board of the Amherst College Press is composed of faculty members of Amherst College. Each member serves a three-year term. Ex officio positions are held by the director of the Amherst College Library, the director of the Mead Art Museum, and the director of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

Editorial Board members:

  • Class of 2019: Leah Schmalzbauer, David Little, Vanessa Walker
  • Class of 2020: Martha Umphrey, Hannah Holleman
  • Class of 2021: Tariq Jaffer, Laure Katsaros
  • Class of 2022: Jen Manion, Michael Kunichika
  • Class of 2023: Aneeka Henderson
  • Class of 2024: Kristin Bumiller, Chris Grobe (chair), Paul Schroeder Rodriguez
  • Class of 2025: Pawan Dhingra, Pooja Rangan

Ex officio positions:

  • Martin Garnar, Director, Frost Library, Amherst College
  • Darryl Harper, Director, Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Amherst College
  • Lisa Crossman, Curator of American Art and Arts of the Americas, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

Operations Group

The Amherst College Press Operations Group is essentially the production backbone of Amherst College Press. It consists of staff at Amherst College Press and Michigan Publishing with a key role in acquiring, developing, and producing ACP titles, or in the administration of this initiative. The current Operations Group consists of:

  • Beth Bouloukos, Director, Amherst College Press
  • Hannah Brooks-Motl, Acquisitions Editor, Amherst College Press
  • Jason Colman, Director, Michigan Publishing Services
  • Carl Lavigne, Digital Publishing Coordinator, Michigan Publishing Services
  • Jeremy Morse, Director of Publishing Technology, Michigan Publishing Services

Our Values

Amherst College Press was founded with the objective of supporting scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, with a focus on the mission and needs of liberal arts institutions. We aim to locate, develop, and sustain this scholarship through a platinum open access publishing model: our works are published at no cost to authors, their institutions, or readers.

We seek to lead the way in establishing best practices for born-digital, peer-reviewed, open access monograph publishing by identifying, evaluating, and advocating for transformative scholarship that spurs creative dialogue within and between traditional fields of inquiry, emphasizes disciplinary innovation, draws upon new models of collaborative research, and strives to reach the broadest audience possible.

Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Amherst College Press holds diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice as core values. As an extension of Amherst College, we recognize and acknowledge the Nonotuck land Amherst occupies, and we also acknowledge our neighboring Indigenous nations: the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and Pequot to the South, the Mohican to the West, and the Abenaki to the North.

ACP stands in solidarity with Black people and the movements centering Black lives and racial, economic, and educational justice. We recognize the need to educate ourselves and to continually emphasize the importance of working towards a scholarly community that listens, learns, and works to rectify past and present grievances. We also recognize the ways in which scholarly publishing has been complicit in perpetuating white supremacy and propping up systems of exclusion, from its reliance on opaque peer review practices and prohibitive pricing models to the industry’s predominantly white labor force. (See the 2019 Lee & Low Books survey of publishers that found the “publishing industry to be… 76% white, showing little change over 5 years in staff diversity across gender identity, race/ethnicity, dis/ability, and sexual orientation,” from the AUP Statement on Equity and Anti-Racism.)

As a small open-access press based at Amherst College, we seek to offer a different model for how the work of scholarly publishing can be done and a voice not typically heard—from the distinctive perspective of a liberal-arts institution—among the institutions that produce published scholarship. We do not assume that our work ends there. Specific steps we have taken and plan to take in order to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion at ACP include:

  • Ensuring our Faculty Board is inclusive and representative of students and former students of Amherst College as well as the audiences we hope to reach with our publishing program.
  • Contributing to industry-wide efforts in transparency around peer review and conducting regular audits on own peer review practices.
  • Contributing to industry-wide efforts to seek out and amplify scholarship from underrepresented groups.
  • Maintaining the mission of open access, including the removal of price and permissions barriers to readers, authors, and institutions.
  • Developing and sustaining an internship program for Amherst College undergraduates in the hopes of creating pipeline opportunities for those who have been historically underrepresented in the publishing industry.
  • Taking part in ongoing trainings and workshops led by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Amherst College; participating in the work of the Frost Library DEI committee.

Statement on Accessibility

Amherst College Press strives to ensure our books and their associated media and resources are available and accessible to anyone who wants to read or use them. As an open access press, we also seek to eliminate some historic barriers to publishing, particularly for those who are first-time authors or who lack institutional support: we charge no fees (commonly called “book processing charges”) to authors or their institutions to publish OA; we make resources available that guide authors through the publication process on our website; we communicate to readers the type of peer review each project underwent in a transparent fashion. We also utilize Creative Commons licensing to ensure our titles can be easily and fairly cited and reused.

We understand that there are many ways to do and read scholarship, which is why we partner with Fulcrum, a platform that makes accessibility a core value and design component. Read more about the ways Fulcrum is developing the platform and its content to be inclusive, accessible, and usable for all readers here.

Our Commitments

Focus on the Liberal Arts. We welcome works exploring intellectual connections across academic disciplines and divisions and champion works whose methods and modalities reach beyond the standard monograph.

Platinum Open Access. Amherst College Press is committed to funding all the costs of acquiring, editing, developing, and producing scholarship. Platinum OA means we can consider works with regard to scholarly merit only. We are particularly interested in topics, fields, and reading and scholarly communities that would benefit from open access books.

Born digital. Amherst College Press makes print copies available for works that render well in print. We also welcome projects of digital scholarship not well served by scholarly conventions limited to print-only outcomes and looks forward to partnering with an emerging community of scholars in the digital humanities who are linking together disciplinary perspectives and using new tools for visualization and reader engagement.

Peer Review

Amherst College Press is committed to the highest standards of peer review in evaluating the work it considers for publication and to communicating the nature of review to readers in a transparent fashion.

As a process of independent and informed evaluation of both argument and originality of scholarly work, peer review is the principal means by which ACP assures the quality and merit of the work it publishes. Please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines page for more details.

Discovery and Reuse

Amherst College Press Press titles are made available under Creative Commons (CC) licenses to maximize opportunities for reuse. The particular CC license chosen is up to the author. As well as being delivered through the Fulcrum platform, Amherst College Press titles are delivered to a range of book indexers, library discovery services, and platforms including JSTOR Open, Muse Open, Open Research Library, and OAPEN. MARC records are available for free download under a CC0 license. See how Amherst College Press titles receive usage all over the world on the Readership Map.

Historical Documents

Read the original Amherst College Press charter from 2014.

The current Amherst College Press extends the long tradition of publishing at Amherst College.

Take a look at some of our legacy titles here.