I acquire Chicago’s books—for both scholarly and general audiences—in sociology, education, and music, especially jazz and blues studies. I am particularly looking for books in the social sciences that challenge our thinking and point us in the right direction. 

If you are an academic looking to expand your book’s audience, look no further than the latest by James M. Lang, Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience.

I welcome books on education broadly—from early childhood education to higher ed and beyond. Brian Soucek offers a timely intervention about higher education in these times with The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education. Mara Casey Tieken examines some of the social costs of college in Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—And What It Costs Them, while in Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks, Janice M. McCabe shows us how social life actually works in college. No matter your college major, you will benefit from reading Corey Moss-Pech’s Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors and Entry-Level Jobs.

Thomas Fallace will make you think differently about learning styles with You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of the Learning Style Idea, while Mark Hlavacik’s Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars will cause you ask what this country’s education goals even are, and why. Finally, embrace the cringe with Kate Eichhorn’s enlightening and entertaining School Yearbook: The Untold Story of a Cringey Tradition and Its Digital Afterlife.

Our wide-ranging sociology list features books of theory, history, mixed methods, longitudinal studies, and more, but its heart belongs to ethnography, as exemplified in three new books on precarious urban living: Sharon Cornelissen’s The Last House on the Block: Black Homeowners, White Homesteaders, and Failed Gentrification in Detroit, Laura A. Orrico’s Making Precarity Work: Life on the Edge of Venice Beach and Jacinto Cuvi’s The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo. Adam S. Hayes helps us think about the confusing social world of money with Irrational Together: The Social Forces That Invisibly Shape Our Economic Behavior, while Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo in Orienting to Chance: Probabilism and the Future of Social Theory challenge social scientists to theorize the role that chance plays in our social order. Sunmin Kim examines the history of American social order in The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate, and Yanfei Sun shakes up the sociology of religion with Religious Change in Post-Mao China: Toward a New Sociology of Religion.

In music, Steven Rings delves into the actual music of Bob Dylan with What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan. Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse explains why jokes about jazz will never die. And Bob Gluck has returned with a book on Pat Metheny, Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words.

My colleague Alan Thomas is responsible for the critical editions of Verdi, New Material Histories of Music series, and the Opera Lab series. Mollie McFee sponsors our Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology series and also acquires our books in popular music studies.

Assistant Editor Mollie McFee ably assists me and is a close collaborator in all of these endeavors.

I studied English literature and music at Yale, then taught middle school for a few years before joining Chicago in 2000. Until 2019, I acquired our books in philosophy; that list is now sponsored by Kyle Wagner.

Prospective authors are encouraged to consult our submission guidelines. We also provide an overview about publishing with Chicago here.