About

Our mission at the Lehigh University Press is to publish high quality books that make original contributions to scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. We publish books in all significant fields of scholarship, including editions of significant unpublished material or of primary texts that have not been edited by modern scholars.

In addition, we have six active series that reflect our historic and recent strengths. "Studies in Eighteenth-Century America and the Atlantic World" publishes rich, innovative scholarship that embraces interdisciplinary work in eighteenth-century transatlantic literature, history, visual arts, material culture, religion, education, law, and medicine. "Studies in Christianity in China" publishes interdisciplinary, innovative scholarship that extends our understanding of Christianity in China from the time of the Jesuits in the Ming dynasty to the Protestants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explores its impact on both the Chinese people and on the countries that sent missionaries to China. "Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe" publishes scholarly interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe's works, influences, and contexts to enhance Poe studies within and beyond the parameters of nineteenth-century American literary history. "Studies in Text and Print Culture," promotes an understanding of literature as closely related to, and informed by, other discursive forms. "Critical Conversations in Horror Studies" examines a range of media including film, television, and literature across a variety of historical eras extending into the contemporary moment and reaching as far back as the origins of horror itself. Our newest series, "Studies in Health Humanities," asks readers to reimagine the critical study of “health,” considering what it can—or should be—in the multiply precarious conditions of the twenty-first century.

Lehigh University Press was established in 1985 with seed money from Lehigh's Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program and the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies. We do not publish recent fiction, recent poetry, or textbooks.

Drawn from Lehigh faculty, the Press's Director and Editorial Board manage the acquisition process of reviewing and selecting works for publication under our imprint. Promising manuscripts are evaluated by scholars in appropriate fields, and their reports inform the Board's deliberations as it meets periodically throughout the year. Our books are produced and distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group (RLPG), with which we have been affiliated since 2010.

History

The Press has had six directors: Nicholas Adams, professor of Art and Architecture; Stephen Cutcliffe, professor of history and director of Lehigh's STS program; Philip A. Metzger, for twenty years curator of Special Collections for the Lehigh University Libraries; Scott Paul Gordon, professor of English and co-director of the Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies; Monica Najar, associate professor of history and co-director of the Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies; and, since 2014, Kate Crassons, associate professor of English.

In 1993, Peter A. Coates's The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology, Conservation, and the Frontier won the Western History Association's W. Turrentine Jackson Award; in 2006 Patricia D'Antonio's Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia was named a Best Book by the American Journal of Nursing; and in 2010 the Philip S. Klein Book Prize was awarded to Sarah Fatherly for Gentlewomen and Learned Ladies: Women and Elite Formation in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia.

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