UNC Press Receives NEH/Mellon Humanities Open Book Program Grant

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The University of North Carolina Press has received a Humanities Open Book Program grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to reissue out-of-print works from the UNC Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures series.

The Press will partner with UNC Chapel Hill’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and the UNC Library on the initiative which will republish more than 120 monographs, translations, and critical editions. This is the first time these works will be available in digital editions, which will be free in open access PDF and EPUB formats, as well as in new paperback editions.

“We are very thankful for the generous support of the NEH and Mellon that will enable us to bring this body of work back into print,” said John McLeod, director of the Office of Scholarly Publishing Services at UNC Press. “We are also excited to be working on this initiative with our partners in the library and the department.”

The series was started by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages in 1953, and it published scholarship in the Germanic languages for more than fifty years, covering an array of topics including medieval and modern literature, theater, linguistics, philology, onomastics, and the history of ideas.

“Having these books made available in digital and paperback form will be of great value to the field of German studies,” said Eric Downing, Gerhard L. Weinberg Distinguished Professor of German and Comparative Literature and Interim Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. “They represent significant scholarly works that continue to help shape current research.”

The Press and the department are partnering with the UNC Library, who will host digital editions and network with other open access hosting partners in the library community. Anne Gilliland, Scholarly Communications Officer and Julie Rudder, Repository Services Department Head, participants on the project for the UNC Library commented, “We’re looking forward to the opportunity to preserve these important works and make them available to the world.”

Here is the press release from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation:

https://www.neh.gov/news/national-endowment-humanities-and-mellon-foundation-announce-grants-digitize-essential

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For more information:

UNC Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Services: https://www.uncpress.org/osps/

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: https://mellon.org/

National Endowment for the Humanities: https://www.neh.gov/