Announcement Regarding COVID-19 and UNC Press Exhibits and Travel

UNC Press has been monitoring closely developments with the worldwide coronavirus outbreak. Yesterday I notified the UNC Press staff that we will not be exhibiting at any conferences through the rest of the spring, including the American Society for Environmental History, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for Military History, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Latin American Studies Association. We will continue to evaluate our participation in future conferences in the coming weeks.

UNC Press staff will restrict all business travel for the next two months. We are also reaching out to all of our authors who may be in various stages of promoting their books through in-person events to reconsider whether they should continue this work. We will unconditionally support our authors’ positions. We are also notifying scholarly organizations and other key partners of our decisions so they can plan accordingly as far in advance as possible.

These decisions are upending the plans of our staff, our authors, and members of communities that we consider to be vital partners to our mission. In many cases, years of work have gone into these plans. We deeply regret the disruption and disappointment caused by our decisions. We know that scholarly societies and bookstores rely on the engagement of our authors and staff for their continued success and we hope that this disruption will be for the briefest time possible.

We are working on ways to minimize and mitigate the impacts of these changes, and we are particularly working to enhance other forms of engagement with communities and individuals we will not be meeting in person. I’m very proud of the energy and creativity coming from our team and we look forward to sharing these plans as they develop.

Sincerely,

John Sherer
Spangler Family Director, University of North Carolina Press