UW Press names director

Robert A. Mandel has been appointed director of the University of Wisconsin Press.

The press publishes journals and books on topics as diverse as prairie ecology, European history, and poetry, and is a division of the university.

Mandel has been director of Syracuse University Press since 1993 and will join the UW Press by early November. He earned his B.A. and M.A. from UW–Madison and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto. After teaching European history for several years in Ontario, he embarked on an academic publishing career that has included stints at Praeger Publishers in New York, the State University of New York Press, Indiana University Press, and Wayne State University Press, where he was press director.

In addition to his work in scholarly publishing, Mandel co-founded a commercial trade publishing house, A&M Publishing, that specializes in general-interest books about the Midwest and Great Lakes region. He also served as CEO of Hodges & Irvine, which publishes books and software for the hotel industry.

“Robert Mandel has a wealth of experience relevant to the directorship of the Press, and we’re all excited to welcome him to UW–Madison — actually, back to Madison, since he is an alumnus,” says Virginia Hinshaw, dean of the Graduate School and a senior research officer of UW–Madison.

“The search committee, along with members of the UW Press, the Press Committee, and the Graduate School, were all impressed with his vision, knowledge, and enthusiasm for the University of Wisconsin Press, and we look forward to working with him as we build for the future,” Hinshaw says.

David Bethea, who has served as interim director of the UW Press since July 1998, will return to teaching and research at UW–Madison later this fall. Bethea is the Vilas Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

The University of Wisconsin Press was founded in 1937. Currently, it publishes about 45 new books each year, with about 1,400 titles in print, and 13 journals, including Ecological Restoration, American Journal of Political Science, Contemporary Literature, and Journal of Human Resources. Publishing a mix of books on scholarly, general interest, and regional Midwest topics, it also distributes books for several Wisconsin agencies and organizations, including the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

Recent new books from UW Press include “Confronting History: A Memoir” by the late historian George Mosse; “Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History” by UW professor emerita Margaret Bogue; “The Isherwood Century,” a collection of essays about British writer Christopher Isherwood, on whose Berlin stories “Cabaret” was based; and “The Years of Bloom,” a new biography of James Joyce that UW Press copublished with Lilliput Press in Dublin.