After more than 50 years of publishing and some 2,000 books, the University of Missouri Press is slated to close. Tim Wolfe, president of the UM system, made the announcement this morning, according to a report in the Columbia Daily Tribune. This comes after major layoffs at the press in 2009.

Judith Lynne Hanna has visited many exotic-dance clubs around the world where “I would feel comfortable dancing—if I could wear the high heels. And I was younger.”

As she says so, the veteran scholar, now in her mid-70s, laughs at the idea. But it’s clear from our talk that moral reservations wouldn’t stop her.

Heels of four inches or more are a stripper’s go-to footwear. Hanna describes their hazards, and much else, in her new book, Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy, and a Christian Right, just out from the University of Texas Press.

Hanna, a former Los Angeles high-school civics teacher with a master’s degree in political science and a doctorate in anthropology, is a longtime dancer (modern) who has published numerous books as well as hundreds of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles. Now an affiliate senior research scientist in anthropology at the…

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Tom Lutz is a professor in the department of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and the founder and editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. If I had been asked these questions three years ago, all my answers would have been different, and not because the media landscape has changed so dramatically. I am now running a daily publication, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the majority of my reading consists of manuscripts in various stages of production.  So before getting out of bed, I read through the newly posted pieces, triple-checking the prose, the links, the layout. The first stop after LARB is always the email accounts, sometimes to actually get to work, sometimes just to see if any fires need putting out.  Then I begin the rest of what is a very brief daily tour:  Talking Points Memo a…

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Carlos Fuentes, who died on Tuesday at age 83, left in his wake a sorrowful Mexico, a mass of readers worldwide, and many hard-working translators. Rendering the writer was a complex task.

“The challenges were many and varied.” writes Alfred Mac Adam, a professor of Spanish at Barnard College, whose translations of the Mexican literary giant include the novels Christopher Unborn, The Years with Laura Diaz, and The Death of Artemio Cruz.

“Fuentes had a huge vocabulary, spoke several languages fluently, and could concoct wordplay among all those languages,” Mac Adam says in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “Sometimes he used Mexican slang (of the 1960s in particular in Christopher Unborn), which made life difficult for his translator. The important thing was to try to replicate the rhythm of his prose.”

As noted in many obituaries and tributes, Fuentes was a public intellectual whose…

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The May issue of American Ethnologist includes essays that the journal’s editor says are among the first detailed ethnographic analyses to be published on the Occupy movements. And in the spirit of the 99%, AE  has made its two Occupy articles and a related commentary piece free to non-subscribers for the duration of 2012.

“The politically emergent—how to interpret and write about it—is an explicit theme of the Occupy articles,” writes editor Angelique Haugerud. “A participant-observer who writes about Occupy plunges into disciplinary dilemmas of ethnographic voice, engagement, and collaborative knowledge production.”

First to take that plunge are Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik, authors of “The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and a Politics of Becoming.” They offer a firsthand look at the movement in Ljubljana, home city of the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. …

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Lisa Bayer has been named the new director of the University of Georgia Press, effective July 1. Bayer is currently the marketing director and regional trade editor at the University of Illinois Press. Before joining Illinois in 2006, she held marketing and sales positions at Southern Illinois University Press, Penn State University Press, Minnesota Historical Society Press, and the Redleaf Press.

She succeeds Nicole Mitchell, who left Georgia in late 2011 to become director of the University of Washington Press.

For admirers of John Steinbeck’s fiction, a new volume of his newspaper columns may come as a shock.

Between December 1966 and May 1967 the then-64-year-old writer contributed 58 columns on the Vietnam war to Newsday, the Long Island, NY, newspaper. In them, the 1962 Nobel Laureate in literature came out strongly in favor of American actions in Southeast Asia.

Reporting from various theaters of the war, Steinbeck had 400,000 readers at Newsday, and millions more at the 29 other papers that syndicated his columns.  Now, as its lead title this season, the University of Virginia Press has issued Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War. This is the first collection of the columns and their first publication in 40 years. The dispatches “infuriated the doves and delighted the hawks,” says Thomas E. Barden, the collection’s editor and a professor of English and dean of the…

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Helen Sword is a professor in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland.  Her new book, Stylish Academic Writing, is just out from Harvard University Press.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. On weekdays I get up at 6 am, put the kettle on for a cup of tea, and settle myself in front of my computer to write for an hour before breakfast. If I’m being good, the first thing I read before I start writing is the last paragraph that I wrote the day before. If I’m not being good, I take a sneak peek at my email first.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

My family subscribes to the New Zealand Herald and The New York Times online, plus a few glossy magazines such as National Geographic, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and Rugby World (a publication of…

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Read The Chronicle’s Jennifer Howard on the new book series from Yale University Press based on Open Yale Courses.

Penny Kaiserlian will retire as director of the University of Virginia Press at the end of June. “I’ve very much enjoyed working with a great group of colleagues,” she writes in an e-mail, “but I think it is time for a new leader to take the press into its next stage.”

Kaiserlian has been director at Virginia since 2001, a position that capped off a career of more than 40 years in scholarly publishing. Before going to Charlottesville, she was at the University of Chicago Press, where she became editorial director and associate director in 1983.

When asked about her most gratifying projects at Virginia, Kaiserlian mentions Rotunda, the press’s electronic imprint. When she arrived, money was available from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the university’s president’s office to create a digital imprint for “peer-reviewed, born-digital scholarship.”  Rotunda, she says, “has now…

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