Plus ça change

In today’s difficult environment in the book industry, it is getting hard to convince publishers to bring out doctoral theses. This is a shame: very often, doctoral work represents the most intense research effort a scholar will make and, importantly, the work is supervised by those with broad experience of the topic itself, of writing and of the requirements of serious scholarship. Commercially, the reluctance to publish makes sense: doctoral theses must address as yet under-colonized or entirely unexplored aspects of their subjects, and these may attract few readers. In some disciplines, supplicants must genuflect before the altars of often faddish theory. But academic presses need to remain open to the potential of some such texts, as the University of British Columbia Press has done here, and granting agencies need to go on subsidizing superior examples of the genre.

Adam Chapnick, now a post-doctoral fellow in Carleton University’s history department, draws...