Campaign for the Humanities

A view from Allie Troyanos, Editor for Literature at Palgrave Macmillan

When I started my career in publishing, my first jobs were in textbook publishing working on medicine and biology. While I learned a vast amount about academic publishing in these roles, I remember thinking, “Wouldn’t it be fun to work on books related to my background knowledge?”

Starting at Palgrave Macmillan as the Literature editor in 2016 felt like the perfect answer to my question as I—like many in the publishing industry—studied English and Creative Writing as an undergraduate. I anticipated having in-depth conversations about my love for Joyce Carol Oates and the first time I read Agatha Christie. My dream came true, as I do have these kinds of fun conversations with authors and my Palgrave colleagues all the time!

More importantly, what I’ve found about the Humanities is that it really is a discipline characterized by its openness to collaboration. This may not have always been the case, but it seems to me that this is the direction that the Humanities have been taking and something that certainly defines our publishing at Palgrave. One of the strengths of the list I commission for is its interdisciplinary focus. Some areas I concentrate on are ecocriticism, geocriticism, mobilities studies, literature and music, and literature and science, to name a few. Of course, Palgrave strives to collaborate within the Humanities—as scholars frequently draw from literature, film and culture, history, and philosophy in any given book. Palgrave Editors work closely across subject teams to promote and support that collaboration as well. Additionally, many of these sub-fields within Literature intersect with other disciplines like the Social Sciences, the Fine Arts, Medicine, and beyond. A point of pride for me is that many of the most cutting-edge areas of literary study are represented on my list, and it is exciting to see the ways in which scholars are pushing the boundaries of disciplinary silos. I’ve been fascinated by how scholars in the Humanities collaborate and are in conversation not only with others within their field, but also with those outside of the Humanities. Ironically, some of the books I’ve found the most interesting to work on at Palgrave involve literature and science—I’ve come full circle! That is the beauty of the Humanities: we play nice with others.

In many ways this is a dream job, not just because I get to work on literary studies, but because I get to support, engage with, and advocate for a discipline that is personally important to me. The greatest joy of my job is leveraging my publishing knowledge to help our authors reach the widest possible audience with their research and scholarship. At Palgrave, we hope to encourage scholars to continue collaborating and conversing across disciplines.