Rebecca Colesworthy is the author of Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the co-editor, with Peter Nicholls, of How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now (Routledge, 2016). She is a senior acquisitions editor at SUNY Press, where she oversees lists in literary and cultural studies, gender and queer studies, Latin American and Latinx studies, and education.
Rebecca Colesworthy
Contributions
Judging by its Cover, Part 2
The first section of “Judging by its Cover” consists of pieces that are interested in the cover as a form of compensation, a covering over, as a piece of gorgeous textile can mask or stand in for what one doesn’t want to confront, or what can’t be confronted for whatever nefarious, oblivious, or self-deceptive reason.
Amateur Hour, or, Feminism Against TERFism
I have heard proclamations of feminism’s death many times over the years. Nevertheless, it came as a genuine surprise when I encountered it this past July, in an essay on “Sidecar,” the New Left Review blog, by NLR editor Caitlín Doherty.
She Works Too Hard for the Money
Shortly after starting as an executive assistant in development at a nonprofit organization in 2012—my first nonacademic job following a three-year postdoctoral position—I joked to my new boss one night after everyone else had gone home that she should only hire former academics because we have no idea how not to work all the time. She laughed, as I guessed she would. Ever the court jester, I like to think I know my audience and I knew that, while not an academic herself, she could relate. We were there working late together and, from the start, I found that I could identify with the way she identified with her work.
Opening the Book, Part II
This second batch of writers on the process of finishing their books ranges from meditations on the situatedness of academic writing to blow-by-blow descriptions of the publication process to a call for more inventive and ethical ways of acknowledging one’s scholarly companions. Here you can find writing on the “hard edge of a colonial language,” in Sarah Dowling’s apt description of her work. Helen Rydstrand narrates the difficulty of accepting any work as good enough. Rebecca Colesworthy calls attention to the “not-writing”: the money, time, and resources that condition the long-term development of a book. And Alix Beeston’s “intervallic bridgework” concludes this installment of the Process cluster by pushing the form of the monograph toward a politics of citation.