I acquire Chicago’s books—for both scholarly and general audiences—in sociology, education, and music, especially jazz and blues studies. I am particularly looking for books in the social sciences that challenge our thinking and point us in the right direction.

If you are an academic looking to expand your book’s audience, look no further than the latest by James M. Lang, Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience.

I welcome books on education broadly—from early childhood education to higher ed and beyond. Jillian Berman masterfully delves into America’s student loan crisis with Sunk Cost: Who’s to Blame for the Nation’s Broken Student Loan System and How to Fix It. Three other new books examine the social costs of college: Mara Casey Tieken’s Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—And What It Costs Them, Ingrid A. Nelson’s Yet Another Costume Party Debacle: Why Racial Ignorance Persists on Elite College Campuses and Anthony Simon Laden’s Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them. No matter your college major, you will benefit from reading Corey Moss-Pech’s Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors and Entry-Level Jobs. Thomas Fallace will make you think differently about learning styles with You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of the Learning Style Idea.

Our wide-ranging sociology list features books of theory, history, mixed methods, longitudinal studies, and more, but its heart belongs to ethnography, as exemplified in two new books on precarious urban living: Laura A. Orrico’s Making Precarity Work: Life on the Edge of Venice Beach and Jacinto Cuvi’s The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo. Claire Laurier Decoteau’s compelling latest is Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life, and you will actually enjoy thinking about rats with Andrew McCumber’s Bad Nature: How Rat Control Shapes Human and Nonhuman Worlds. Adam S. Hayes helps us think about the confusing social world of money with Irrational Together: The Social Forces That Invisibly Shape Our Economic Behavior.

In music, Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse explains why jokes about jazz will never die. And Bob Gluck has returned with a book on Pat Metheny, Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words.

My colleague Alan Thomas is responsible for the critical editions of Verdi, New Material Histories of Music series, and the Opera Lab series. Mollie McFee sponsors our Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology series and also acquires our books in popular music studies.

Assistant Editor Mollie McFee ably assists me and is a close collaborator in all of these endeavors.

I studied English literature and music at Yale, then taught middle school for a few years before joining Chicago in 2000. Until 2019, I acquired our books in philosophy; that list is now sponsored by Kyle Wagner. And until 2021, I acquired our ethnomusicology series.

Prospective authors are encouraged to consult our submission guidelines. We also provide an overview about publishing with Chicago here.