University of Michigan Library

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion | Academic Innovation

Raising Up Creative Voices—University Press Week 2020

A saxophone featured in the foreground of a line of people at a musical performance event

Photo by Jens Thekkeveettil on Unsplash

Supporting innovative scholarship is a key value at the University of Michigan Press, and one prominent subject area where this is highlighted through a diverse array of scholarship is in its music and performance studies titles. The Press’ forward-thinking, inclusive editorial and production teams have helped several authors with unique voices publish works that share new research in these topics in exciting ways.

Providing a space for these exceptional creative experts helps broaden discussions of how best to share and recognize new ideas in these highly visual and auditory spaces. Whether the authors are examining underdeveloped areas of their field, speaking to their own extraordinary experiences, or taking advantage of new technologies for heightened creative and pedagogical outcomes, the University of Michigan Press has set several examples of how to raise these voices through academic publishing.

Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music on the Move (June 2020)

This media-rich, open access text explores the cultural, linguistic, and political migrations of music in a variety of genres and styles. The author's globally-minded examination of key concepts such as migration, diaspora, mediation, propaganda, copyright, and hybridity uses dozens of audio clips, video-taped performances, images, interactive maps and charts to fully immerse the reader in Fosler-Lussier’s research.

Kareem Khubchandani, Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (July 2020)

This author’s debut book encourages readers to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism through the study of the gay nightlife and performance of queer South Asian men in Bangalore and Chicago. Ultimately, Ishtyle demonstrates that the unlikely site of nightlife can be a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.

Interview with Kareem Khubchandani on New Books Network

Ken Fischer with Robin Lea Pyle, Everybody In, Nobody Out: Inspiring Community at Michigan's University Musical Society (July 2020)

Written by the former President of the renowned University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, this book describes a decades-long ambitious campaign to expand and diversify the organization’s programming and audiences—initiatives inspired by Fischer’s overarching philosophy toward promoting the arts, “Everybody In, Nobody Out.” Fischer reflects on the power of the performing arts to engage and enrich communities—not by handing down cultural enrichment from on high, but by meeting communities where they live and helping them preserve cultural heritage, incubate talent, and find ways to make community voices heard.


A.D. Carson, i used to love to dream (August 2020)

Following his groundbreaking dissertation album, scholar and artist A.D. Carson released with the University of Michigan Press the first peer-reviewed rap album from an academic publisher this year. Carson created a new format—the mixtap/e/ssay, combining the mixtape and personal and scholarly essay—and composed and performed fourteen tracks that account for moral, philosophical, and ethical dimensions undergirding unease about authenticity, highlighting outlooks on Black life generally, and Black manhood in particular, in the United States.


“Impeccably researched and offering a wealth of information about Puerto Rican drag and trans performance, this book succeeds in summarizing and explaining a diverse, complex and polemical visual, literary and scholarly corpus—and proposing theoretically innovative and compelling, decolonial readings of Puerto Rican performative cultures.”

- Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé
Fordham University

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (April 2021)

This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. La Fountain-Stokes, a drag performer himself, demonstrates how these performances provide a means to explore and critique issues of gender, sexuality, race, class, poverty, national identity, and migratory displacement.

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