News & Events

We are delighted to announce the University of Exeter Press has received an award under the Book Industry Communications (BIC) accreditation scheme.

We have received a BIC Product Data Excellence Plus Award, awarded for outstanding performance, recognising the efforts that we make to ensure that the information we provide about our books is timely and accurate.  Good quality information about our books makes it easier for book buyers to discover and choose our books, and helps our authors to reach their audience. 

The award panel commended UEP for our commitment to improving our data and also for our excellent statistics.  We are very proud to be one of the 20 publishers who currently hold a BIC Excellence Plus Award.

We are also very grateful for the support of our partners including NBN International, Nielsen Book and Stison – thank you!

Launched in 2010, the Product Data Excellence Awards scheme is designed to encourage publishers to appreciate the contribution made by accurate and timely product data to their sales; to enable them to demonstrate their commitment to making that data available in the supply chain; and to enable them to benchmark their performance against their competitors.

The scheme is open to publishing companies or divisions of publishing groups where a stand-alone system of product data provision is in place, and will be judged on the combined performance standards of publishers and their distributors.

The scheme offers three levels of award, which recognise the issues individual publishers face and the increasing complexity of maintaining and transmitting product information: the BIC Basic award; the BIC Excellence award; and the BIC Excellence Plus award for outstanding performance.

You can read more about the awards and see the current list of award holders here

Congratulations to two of our UEP authors Richard Lowell MacDonald and Joel Schechter, both finalists in the Theatre Library Awards in exceptionally strong fields.

The Theatre Library Association is proud to announce the TLA Book Award winners for English language works of scholarship on theatre, film, and broadcasting, published in 2016. Read more about the awards here

Joel’s Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpolewas confirmed as a finalist in the 2016 George Freedley Memorial Awardfor an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance

Richard was also listed as a finalist in the 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Awardfor an exemplary work in the field of recorded performance with The Appreciation of Film: The Postwar Film Society Movement and Film Culture in Britain

Both books are available through UEP and can be ordered direct from us through our website, from online retailers and through your local bookshop.  

We are delighted to announce that UEP is now distributing Kapon Editions, the award-winning specialist publishers of books on Greek archaeology, culture and history.  For over 30 years, based in Athens, Moses and Rachel Kapon have been publishing high-quality, often lavishly illustrated, books on archaeology, history, art, theatre, literature, architecture, environment and science.

In 1980, their very first book won the Academy of Athens Award; collaborations with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and various cultural institutions, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and international recognition and prizes followed. In 2010 Rachel Kapon received an individual award from the Academy of Athens for her artistic achievement in the field of scholarly publications relating to the monuments of the Greek past. 

The full list of Kapon Editions titles currently available through UEP can be found here and books can be ordered direct from us through our website, from online retailers and through your local bookshop.  

Steve Nicholson, author of the successful series The Censorship of British Drama, 1900-1968 is speaking on this topic at the National Theatre on 20 November. Entitled 'In Context: Censorship in British Theatre', Nicholson explores how playwrights including Harley Granville Barker (Waste was refused a licence until it was re-written), Bernard Shaw, Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde and Terence Rattigan suffered under the system.

The event is on Friday, 20 November, in the Cottesloe Room at the National Theatre. Tickets are £20.

For more information, click here.

The final volume of the succesful series,
The Censorship of British Drama, 1900-1968
by Steve Nicholson is now available for purchase.
Volume 4: The Sixties examines how theatre
censorship changed in this pivotal decade.

The 1960s was a significant decade in social and
political spheres in Britain, especially in the theatre. 
As certainties shifted and social divisions widened,
a new generation of theatre makers arrived, ready to sweep away yesterday’s conventions and challenge
the establishment.

Focusing on plays we know, plays we have forgotten, and plays which were silenced forever, this book demonstrates the extent to which censorship shaped
the theatre voices of the decade.

The concluding part of Steve Nicholson’s four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900 until 1968, previously undocumented material from the Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal archives at Windsor are examined to describe the political and cultural implications of a powerful elite exerting pressure in an attempt to preserve the veneer of a polite, unquestioning society.

About the author
Steve Nicholson is Professor of 20th-Century and Contemporary Theatre, and Director of Drama, in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. He is the series editor for Exeter Performance Studies and the author of British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism, 1917-1945, also published by UEP.

Click here for more information about ordering the book.

UEP author and series editor Steve Nicholson has published an article in the Guardian newspaper detailing how anti-Nazi plays were suppressed by the British Monarchy in 1930s Britain. Plays were sent to the German Embassy for approval before being staged in London.

The article can be accessed by clicking here.
More can be read about this in Nicholson's series The Censorship of British Drama, 1900-1968 series. For more information, please see the individual books on our website, by clicking here.

UEP is pleased to announce that The Maritime
History of Cornwall edited by Philip Payton, Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe has won the Holyer an Gof Non-Fiction Award for titles covering the subjects of Marine, Industrial Heritage and the Environment.

The winners of the Holyer an Gof awards were announced on 14 July, at Waterstones book shop in Truro. Editors Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe were in attendance to accept the award for this book.

More information about the other winners can be found here.

UEP is pleased to announce that The Maritime
History of Cornwall edited by Philip Payton, Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe has been nominated for the Holyer an Gof award for titles covering the subjects of Marine, Industrial Heritage and the Environment.

The annual Gorsedh Kernow Holyer an Gof Awards
were instigated in 1996, and are so named in
memory of Redruth publisher and Cornish bard Leonard Truran, whose bardic name was Holyer an Gof - Follower of The Smith.   An Award established and organised by members of Gorsedh Kernow to raise the standard and profile of books published about Cornwall or in Cornish (Kernewek).

Other titles in the category are:
Remains of the Pilchard Fishing Industry of St Ives and West Cornwall by John Ferguson (St Ives Archive)
The Cornish Fishing Industry by John McWilliams (Amberley Publishing)

The winners of the Holyer an Gof awards will be announced on 14 July, at Waterstones book shop in Truro.

More information about the Holyer an Gof Awards can be found here.

The University of Exeter Press 2015 Catalogue presents our complete list of 300 titles, including those to which you can look forward to from us this year. Covering a vast range of subjects, UEP's list stretches from the wildness of the Cornish peninsula to the glamour of Hollywood, the Middle Ages to present day. Our titles present innovative multidisciplinary approaches and offer fresh perspectives on unique topics.

Our newest books include: an investigation into alternative translation techniques in French poetry in Translating Apollinaire; a reissue in paperback of the successful film history series The Beginnings of the Cinema in England; and Charles Urban, an appreciation of this eponymous film producer, which won the Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Award 2014.

The catalogue can be viewed and downloaded here.

University of Exeter Press is now distributing all forthcoming titles for the Archaeological Institute of America in Europe and the Middle East. For a full list of their titles, click here.

AIA promotes archaeological inquiry and public understanding of the material record of the human past to foster an appreciation of diverse cultures and our shared humanity. The AIA educates people of all ages about the significance of archaeological discovery and advocates the preservation of the world's archaeological heritage. A new series Selected Papers on Ancient Art and Architecture (SPAAA) is published annually.

University of Exeter Press will have a stand at the Edinburgh Arab Festival, 28-29 August, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The festival is organised by the Islamic & Middle Eastern Department, University of Edinburgh, and will include exhibitions, galleries, language taster workshops, seminars, film screenings and food tastings.

More information about the festival can be found by clicking here.

Mining in Cornwall & Devon: Mines and Men by Roger Burt, with Raymond Burnley, Michael Gill and Alasdair
Neill was shortlisted for the Tratman Award for Best Caving Book of the Year, awarded by the Ghar Parau Foundation.

The Tratman Award has been awarded annually since 1979 to a caving-related paper-based publication in memory of E.K. Tratman, who died in 1978. It covers books, journals and articles published in a calendar year and is administered by the Ghar Parau Foundation, but judged by  independent cavers.

The winner of the award was Goufree Berger by Mark Wright and Robbie Shone.

For more information, please click here.

University of Exeter Press is now dsitributing the titles published by the Freelance Academy Press in Europe and the Middle East. A full list of their titles can be found here.

Freelance Academy Press brings readers innovative books and rich supporting material in the field of Western martial arts, American and European history, arms and armour, chivalry, and historical arts and crafts.

University of Exeter Press has started selling eBooks. Our most popular titles published over the last two decades in Performance Studies, Film History, South-West Studies and History are now available on all e-readers. All new and forthcoming books will be available as eBooks.

For more information about our eBooks, click here.

Our first title to be published in 2015 is
Acting Greek Tragedy by Graham Ley.

Acting Greek Tragedy explores the dynamics of physical interaction and the dramaturgical construction of scenes in ancient Greek tragedy. Ley argues that spatial distinctions between ancient and modern theatres are not significant, as core dramatic energy can be placed successfully in either context.

Guiding commentary on selected passages from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides illuminates the problems involved with performing monologue, dialogue, scenes requiring three actors, and scenes with properties. A companion website - actinggreektragedy.com - offers recorded illustrations
of scenes from the Workshops.

What the book offers is a practical approach to the preparation of Greek scripts for performance. The translations used have all been tested in workshops, with those of Euripides newly composed for this book.

The companion website can be found here: www.actinggreektragedy.com

About the author
Graham Ley is Professor Emeritus of Drama and Theory, University of Exeter. He has taught drama at the University of London and Greek literature in Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater (2nd edition, 2006) and The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy (2007).

Click here for more information about ordering the book.

UEP's Middle Eastern Archaeology Catalogue 2015 presents all titles from the presses we represent in Europe and the Middle East. The focus of this catalogue is archaeology relating to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Books on archaeological research in North America which have been published by these presses have also been included.

This catalogue highlights the forthcoming 2015 titles, including a  survey of the coastal town Pyla-Koutsopetria, a full archaeological and pictorial presentation of the Temple of Ramesses II at Abydos and a catalogue of Islamic artworks arranged thematically. Other recent publications from 2014 are also highlighted; these include the second massive volume on rock inscriptions in the Theban Desert and the archaeological reports of several important sites in Egypt and the Levant.

The catalogue can be viewed by clicking here.

University of Exeter Press is now dsitributing the titles published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Europe and the Middle East. A full list of their titles can be found here.

More information about the Centre and what do can be found on their website, www.cigionline.org.

Our last title to be published in 2014 is
Ancient Greek and Contemporary Performance: Collected Essays by Graham Ley.

This collection of published and unpublished essays connects antiquity with the present by debating the current prohibiting conceptions of performance theory and the insistence on a limited version of ‘the contemporary’.

The theatre is attractive for its history and also for its lively present. These essays explore aspects of historical performance in ancient Greece, and link thoughts on its significance to wider reflections on cultural theory from around the world and performance in the contemporary postmodern era, concluding with ideas on the new theatre of the diaspora.

Each section of the book includes a short introduction; the essays and shorter interventions take various forms, but all are concerned with theatre, with practical aspects of theatre and theoretical dimensions of its study. The subjects range from ancient Greece to the present day, and include speculations on the origin of ancient tragic acting, the kinds of festival performance in ancient Athens, how performance is reflected in the tragic scripts, the significance of the presence of the chorus, technology and the ancient theatre, comparative thinking on Greek, Indian and Japanese theory, a critique of the rhetoric of performance theory and of postmodernism, reflections on modernism and theatre, and on the importance of adaptation to theatre, studies of the theatre and diaspora in Britain.

About the author
Graham Ley is Professor Emeritus of Drama and Theory, University of Exeter. He has directed and translated for the theatre and was dramaturg to John Barton in Tantalus directed by Peter Hall (Denver USA, 2000, UK, 2001). He has previously published with both University of Exeter Press and University of Chicago Press.

Click here for more information about ordering the book.

University of Exeter Press announces the publication
of its newest South-West Studies title The Maritime History of Cornwall edited by Philip Payton, Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe.

Cornwall is quintessentially a maritime region.  Almost
an island, nowhere in it is further than 25 miles from the sea. Cornwall’s often distinctive history has been moulded by
this omnipresent maritime environment, while its
strategic position at the western approaches—jutting
out into the Atlantic—has given this history a global impact.

It is perhaps surprising then, that, despite the central place of the sea in Cornwall’s history, there has not yet been a
full maritime history of Cornwall.  The Maritime History of Cornwall sets out to fill this gap, exploring the rich and complex maritime inheritance of this unique peninsula.

In a beautifully illustrated volume, individually commissioned contributions from distinguished historians elaborate on the importance of different periods, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

The Maritime History of Cornwall is a significant addition to the literature of international maritime history and is indispensable to those with an interest in Cornwall past and present.

On 8 November 2014, UEP together with the
National Maritime Museum Cornwall hosted a book launch
to celebrate the publication of this project that has been
a decade in the making. The museum in Falmouth
provided a thematic backdrop to the editors' presentation. Colonel Edward Bolitho, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, was in attendance and accepted a copy of the book in thanks for the support the Lieutenancy have provided over the years.

About the editors

Philip Payton is Emeritus Professor of Cornish & Australian Studies at the University of Exeter, and Professor of History at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. He has published extensively on the Cornish and the Cornish Diaspora. Helen Doe is an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Maritime Studies in the University of Exeter and has published articles and books on both Cornish and wider English maritime history. Alston Kennerley is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Plymouth where he taught Navigation and Maritime History, and also an Honorary Fellow of the University of Exeter.

University of Exeter Press has
recently reissued one of its most successful book series in paperback. The Beginnings of the Cinema in Englad, 1894-1901 by John Barnes is available for the first time in the new format. 

Describing in detail one of the most inventive periods in the history of English cinema, the volumes in this celebrated series are already established as classics in their field. Each volume details the highlights of a single cinematic year, including details of production, manufacturers of equipment, dealers and exhibitors. This is augmented by numerous carefully chosen illustrations and a comprehensive filmography of English films, fiction and non-fiction, for the year. Particular attention is also paid to the ways in which the cinema of other countries affected the English industry. Volumes 1 and 5 are edited by Richard Maltby. Volume 1 also has a foreword by David Robinson. Volume 5 is introduced by Richard Maltby.

Volume 1, 1894–1896: Delving into the emergence of cinema, this volume details the transition from theatre to the big screen.

Volume 2, 1897: Here the focus is major influences to cinema including Robert W. Paul, the Jubilee, regionality and foreign influxes.

Volume 3, 1898: Technical advancements and American influences are presented and explained in Volume III.

Volume 4, 1899: French and American impacts are considered, while a survey of the cinematic process is given.

Volume 5, 1900: Popular subjects in cinema become the conflict in South Africa against the Boers and the Boxer Uprising in China.

About the author
John Barnes wrote extensively on the beginnings of the cinema and on pre-cinema history. Barnes was awarded the Jean Mitry Prize for a life-long contribution to film in 1998.

For more information, click here. 

We are very happy to announce that
Singing Simpkin and other Bawdy Jigs by Roger Clegg
and Lucie Skeaping has been shortlisted for the
Katharine Briggs Book Award by the Folklore Society. 

The award was established by the Folklore Society to encourage the study of folklore, to help improve the standard of folklore publications in Britain and Ireland,
to establish the Folklore Society as an arbiter of excellence, and to commemorate the life and work
of the distinguished scholar Katharine Mary Briggs (1898-1980; Society president 1969-1972).

The winner of the award will be announced during a reception on 19 November, at The Warbug Institute, London.

For more information, please click here.

University of Exeter Press is delighted to announce the publication of Mining in Cornwall and Devon: Mines
and Men by Roger Burt with Raymond Burnley,
Michael Gill and Alasdair Neill.

Mining in Cornwall and Devon is an economic history of mines, mineral ownership, and mine management in the South West of England.

The work brings together material from a variety of hard-to-find sources on the thousands of mines that operated in Cornwall and Devon from the late 1790s to the present day. It presents information on what they produced and when they produced it; who the owners and managers were and how many men, women and children were employed. For the mine owners, managers and engineers, it also offers a guide to their careers outside  the South West, in other mining districts across Britain and the world. A long section on the Duchy of Cornwall provides details of the Duchy's role as the largest mineral owner in the South West, and of the modernisation and changing administration of the Stannaries.

The printed book provides a guide to the sources, their interpretation and how they illustrate the long-term development and decline of the industry; the composite mine-by-mine tables are presented on an interactive CD included free with the book.

About the authors
Roger Burt is Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the University of Exeter. He has been a consultant to mining companies and government departments and contributes to radio programmes on mining related issues.
Raymond Burnley is the software designer for the project, and is a former IT Systems Developer at the University of Exeter.
Michael Gill was a Research Fellow in the University of Exeter Economic History Department.  He has also worked as a surveyor in the Mining and Civil Engineering industries.
Alasdair Neill is a freelance researcher on mining in the UK.

University of Exeter Press is delighted to announce the publication of our newest European Studies title Translating Apollinaire by Clive Scott.

Translating Apollinaire delves into Apollinaire’s poetry
and poetics through the challenges and invitations it
offers to the process of translation.

Besides providing a new appraisal of Apollinaire, the
most significant French poet of WWI, Translating Apollinaire aims to put the ordinary reader at the centre of the translational project. It proposes that
translation’s primary task is to capture the responses of the reader to the poetic text, and to find ways of
writing those responses into the act of translation.
Every reader is invited to translate, and to translate with a creativity appropriate to the complexity of their own reading experiences. Throughout, Scott himself consistently uses the creative resource of photography, and more particularly photographic fragments, as a cross-media language used to help capture the activity of the reading consciousness.

About the author
Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature, University of East Anglia. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and 2014 President of the Modern Humanities Research Association. He has been described as “the founder of an innovative school of UK translation studies” at the University of East Anglia.

Falmouth University is hosting the 'World Documentary Film & TV' Conference on September 4-6, 2014.

About the Conference
To contribute to world cinema documentary studies and to film theory/practice debates, the World Documentary Film & TV Conference aims to bring together international scholars and film practitioners. It seeks to critically examine historical and contemporary world documentary films and factual television productions, whose analyses have been developed across many disciplines, but rarely discussed in one place.

More information can be found here: http://worlddocumentary.org/

University of Exeter Press is delighted to announce the publication of a new local interest book,
Water in the City: The Aqueducts
and Underground Passages of Exeter by Mark Stoyle. 

The network of subterranean tunnels known as ‘the Underground Passages’ are one of Exeter’s most famous architectural survivals, as well as one of its most
popular tourist attractions, and they serve both to symbolize and to illustrate the city’s rich historic past.

First constructed at the time of the Black Death, the Underground Passages stood at the heart of a complex system of urban water supply, which was among the most advanced and sophisticated in mediaeval England. Along these dark, mysterious subways, generations of Exeter plumbers crept, lit only by guttering candles, as they worked on lead water-pipes laid deep beneath the city streets.

  On June 5th, UEP hosted the launch for this book at Exeter's Underground Passages Interpretation Centre. The Lord Mayor Percy Prowse attended and was presented a copy of the book in appreciation of the support Exeter City Council has lent the project from the beginning.

About the author
Mark Stoyle grew up in Devon, and worked for some years as an archaeologist in Exeter; he is Professor of early modern History at the University of Southampton.  He is on the editorial advisory panel of BBC History Magazine and has appeared on dozens of TV and Radio programmes, including 'Who Do You Think You Are?', 'The Great British Story', 'Making History' and 'The Roots of English'.

University of Exeter Press attended the Sony World Photography Awards gala in London on 30 April to accept the award for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award 2014, given to Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925 by Luke McKernan.

UEP is very proud of Luke's achievement and we are particularly honoured since this is the second time one of our books has been awarded this prize.

For more information about the book, please click here. 

© Robert Leslie for 2014 Sony World Photography Awards

Pictured are Franca Driessen, Marketing Assistant UEP and
Dave Calhoun (jury chair), Global Film Editor for the Time Out Group

University of Exeter Press is delighted to announce that Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925 by Luke McKernan has won the Moving Image Book Award for 2014 given by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation as part of the Sony World Photography Awards.

The KKF Book Awards are the UK's leading prizes for books published in the field of photography and the moving image. They were founded in 1985 by the
prolific Hungarian publisher and founder of Focal Press, Andor Kraszna-Krausz. The winner was announced on
30 April at the Sony World Photography Awards gala ceremony held in London. The shortlisted and highly commended books will be showcased at Somerset House, London, 1-18 May, as part of the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition. 

The jury -- Dave Calhoun (chair) Global Film Editor for the Time Out Group, Sean Cubitt Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths and Robert Rider Head of Cinema at the Barbican -- had this to say about the book:

"The jury thought Luke McKernan's Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925 was a meticulously researched study of a hitherto neglected, significant figure in the early development of British cinema. In an engaging and spirited fashion, McKernan sheds new light on an important individual while using Urban's story to illuminate wider trends and changes in the cinema of the time. He brings a personality and a period alive. The jury warmly congratulates Luke McKernan on winning this year's prize."

For more information about the book, please click here.

University of Exeter Press is now encouraging and accepting proposals in new subject areas. They are the following:

• History of medicine
• History of witchcraft and cults
• Modern European history
• Arabic and Islamic studies

If you wish to submit a proposal, please download and fill out the book proposal form, found here, and then email it to Simon Baker, at S.C.Baker@exeter.ac.uk.

We are also accepting journal proposals, information for which can be found under the 'For Authors' tab.

A representative from UEP will be attending the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies conference from April 24^th to 26^th at the Senate House Library, London. Our partner, Intellect, will also be in attendance. Please come meet us at our joint stand.

Find out more: http://www.baftss.org/category/conference/

UEP is thrilled to announce that Charles Urban:
Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925 by Luke McKernan has been shortlisted for the Best Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation.

The KKF Book Awards are the UK’s leading prizes for books published in the field of photography and the moving image.  The shortlisted books, which range from stunningly executed personal photography projects to academic books tackling previously unexplored topics,
will now compete for a £10,000 prize. The shortlisted and highly commended books will be showcased at Somerset House, London, May 1–18, as part of the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition. The winners will
be announced on 30 April at the Sony World Photography Awards gala ceremony held in London.

Best Moving Image Book Award

The jury - Dave Calhoun (chair), Global Film Editor for the Time Out Group, along with Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television, Goldsmiths and Robert Rider, Head of Cinema at the Barbican – selected a shortlist comprising:

• Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897 - 1925 by Luke McKernan (University of Exeter Press)
• Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 by Thomas Doherty (Columbia University Press)
• Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation by Tom Sito (MIT Press)
  
  

The jury also recognised and highly commended the following titles:

• Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies by Ariel Rogers (Columbia University Press)
• Hollywood in the New Millennium by Tino Bailo (British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan Higher Education)
• Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader by Giorgio Bertellini (John Libbey Publishing Ltd., 2013)
• Seeing is Believing: The Politics of the Visual by Rod Stoneman (Black Dog Publishing)
• The Documentary Film Book by Brian Winston (British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan Higher Education)
• The Making of Return of the Jedi: The Definitive Story Behind the Film by J.W. Rinzler (Aurum Press Ltd)
• The World is Ever Changing by Nicolas Roeg (Faber & Faber)

On behalf of the judges, Chair Dave Calhoun commented: "The jury was impressed by the variety of submissions for the prize. The eligible books straddled a wide range of approaches to popular and academic writing and represented the pleasing breadth of current publishing on cinema, including memoirs, studies of individual films and filmmakers, explorations of national cinemas and insights into particular aspects of the filmmaking craft.  Each of the three shortlisted books was superbly written and researched and offered new perspectives on cinema from very different angles.”

For more information: http://www.worldphoto.org/kkf

Our newest publication has been mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement from March 5^th, 2014.

Below is an extract:

“In Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs (University of Exeter Press, £30), Roger Clegg and Lucie Skeaping have spotted ‘something that sounds very like a jig been discreetly advertised’ in 1653: ‘there will appear a merry conceited fellow which hath formerly given content’ at the Red Bull, a playhouse that had probably managed to stay open by bribery.”

To read the whole piece, click here.

 University of Exeter Press is delighted to announce the release of Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs. Our newest book was published on February 20, 2014.

These days the word ‘jig’ usually means a ‘dance’; but in the context of the Tudor and Stuart playhouses, it had a broader meaning: a short musical comedy play, which could be bawdy, satirical and even outrageous.

Although jigs were sung to popular tunes of the day, little information about the music survives. For the first time in 400 years, Clegg and Skeaping’s book reunites the scripts with their original tunes, creating a practical performing edition of the nine jigs that survive today.

Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs
Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage
Scripts, Music and Context

by Roger Clegg and Lucie Skeaping

ISBN: 9780859898782
February 2014 | £30, $43 PB | 352pp

About the book

A popular crowd-pleaser in the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century, the dramatic jig was a short, comic, bawdy musical-drama which included elements of dance, slapstick and disguise. With a cast of ageing cuckolds and young head-strong wives, knavish clowns, roaring soldiers and country bumpkins, jigs often followed as afterpieces at London's playhouses, and were performed at fairs, in villages and in private houses. Troublesome to the authorities, they drew the crowds by offering a lively antidote to more sober theatrical fare.

This performance edition presents for the first time nine examples of English dramatic jigs from the late sixteenth century through to the Restoration; the scripts are re-united as far as possible with their original tunes. Musical notation and dance instructions are provided alongside the text of the jigs. It gives a comprehensive history, discusses sources, plots, instrumentation and dancing, and offers practical information on staging jigs today.

'Singing Simpkin presents and appraises textual and musical evidence relating to the stage jig with exemplary thoroughness. The book adds greatly to our picture of stage performance generally, from Shakespeare's time to the Restoration.' - Jeremy Barlow, specialist in early English music from 1550 to 1750.

About the authors

Roger Clegg is Senior Lecturer in Drama Studies at De Montfort University. Lucie Skeaping presents 'The Early Music Show' on BBC Radio 3. She is a musician and broadcaster. Both have run jig workshops for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe and with students of music and drama.

University of Exeter Press has recently finalized an agreement to join Intellect Books as an imprint. Intellect is an independent academic publisher in the fields of creative practice and popular culture. We look forward to the new opportunities and engaging projects that will result from this partnership.

Simon Baker, who has run UEP for the last twenty years, will remain as Publisher. He says of the purchase: 'The two businesses share a common heritage, that of publishing the best in scholarship and a commitment to publishing it in the best possible way. I am looking forward to seeing the UEP list expand again over the coming years'.

'This is an important move in Intellect's development', says Masoud Yazdani, founder and Chairman of Intellect. 'We have built a strong reputation for publishing in new and emerging subject areas over the past 27 years. However, in order to expand, we need to form partnerships with other like-minded publishers. We have greatly benefited from our distribution partnership with the University of Chicago Press, and feel the partnership with UEP will be just as successful'.

To view Intellect’s website click here.