Can you
guess which of the following award-winning, widely reviewed books from the past
couple of years originated as a dissertation?

Bethany
Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart

Pekka
Hamalainen, Comanche Empire

Brian DeLay,
War of a Thousand Deserts

Aaron Sachs,
The Humboldt Current

Danielle McGuire,
At the Dark End of the Street

Sarah Igo,
The Averaged American

It’s a trick
question; they all did. First books – often dissertations revised with the help
of editors and peer reviewers – are among the most important scholarship
published by university presses. The best revised dissertations are
field-defining buzz books that generate excitement in, and sometimes outside,
the academy. (Moreton, Sachs, and Igo were all reviewed in the New York Times.)
Many sell well too, especially if they get assigned widely in courses.

If you think
about it, the success of superlative first books makes sense. To make it in a
cutthroat job market, new PhDs must position their work for maximum impact, and
as a result they're often especially attuned to market considerations. But revised
dissertations catch a lot of flak these days. Some of my colleagues at other
university presses talk openly about how they won’t acquire this kind of book
at all, even as the presses they work for continue to publish revised
dissertations that are (as far as I can tell) strong performers. When some publishing
professionals talk critically about books based on dissertations, I think
they’re really talking about less interesting, less successful books in this
category. “Revised dissertations,” according to this thinking, equals “bad
revised dissertations.”

At Nebraska books by junior scholars are an
important part of our publishing program. They complement books by professors at
other career stages and by authors outside the academy, adding richness and
variety to our portfolio. I’d encourage you to take a look at some first books from
our list – starting perhaps with David Delgado Shorter’s We Will Dance Our
Truth, Brian Frehner’s Finding Oil, David Preston’s The Texture
of Contact, or Matthew Stanard’s Selling the Congo. And if you’re
an author currently revising a dissertation for publication, you may be
interested in Nebraska’s two Mellon-supported series, which consist entirely of
books by junior scholars: Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas and Early American Places.

-Derek