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Meet the Director: Eric Schwartz

This October, you joined ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ as our Director. What drew you to NYU, and how has your professional background informed your new role?

When asked in my interview why I would want to leave Columbia for NYU, my answer was simple: NYU is downtown, while Columbia is uptown. To non-New Yorkers, this distinction may seem trivial, but for a Long Islander like myself who grew up in the 80s and lived around NYC in the 90s and 00s, 14th Street represented the dividing line between culture and counterculture. Like NYU, I belong below 14th Street. 

NYU’s borderless campus has the Bobst Library as its institutional center, situated on the south corner of Washington Square Park, an iconic hub of New York City’s downtown scene. From folk musicians to punk rockers, beatniks to Nuyorican poets, abstract expressionists to pop artists, and slavery abolitionists to LGBTQ+ activists, many of America’s great countercultural movements have coalesced in The Village, NYU’s home neighborhood. After 35 years in the university press publishing community of greater New York, this opportunity to lead the press most aligned with my formative cultural identity felt like the perfect confluence of timing, institutional needs, and skill set. New York is always changing, and being back in the neighborhood after 20 years, I often find myself on a nostalgia trip thinking about how “this used to be that.” Still, it feels great to be back downtown where I feel most at home, joining a press with such enthusiasm to write its next chapter. 

As our Director, you’re forging a new path for the Press. What excites you about the future of ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½?

NYU’s home base is downtown, but in the 2010s, it expanded globally, establishing campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai and eleven global academic centers. .  ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ has made significant progress in publishing on global topics and establishing global partnerships. A prime example is the Library of Arabic Literature, with over 40 translated volumes. There’s potential for ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½ to leverage NYU’s global network to build partnerships that expand our offerings and reinforce NYU’s identity as a global institution. At the same time, I would love to see us continue to embrace and celebrate the unique cultural legacy of downtown New York. For me, the mantra that captures this vision is “ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½: Downtown to the World.â€

Of course, we’re also facing unique challenges. What are the problems facing the publishing industry today, and how can we adapt to changing times?

University press publishing tends to attract temperamentally conservative people. The process is slow because it is deliberate and collaborative; those who can’t handle this pace often move on. But this also means we can be more resistant to change than other parts of the publishing world, where consistency has worked for decades. It’s become cliché to say that the COVID pandemic changed everything, but it did. Technologies like ebook collections, print on demand, digital catalogs, and video calls existed pre-pandemic, and many of us could afford to treat them as secondary. That is no longer the case; the market for books and the way people discuss them have changed in ways we can’t ignore.

The fundamental unit of a university press will always be the monograph: a focused, 50-100k-word work that asks and answers a single research question. However, the idea that it must appear as a uniquely designed, jacketed hardcover on a bookstore table was always a bit unrealistic. University presses compete with larger commercial trade publishers for space and attention, but today, this format is not something our consumers are willing to pay for. The touchstones of 20th-century university press culture—the campus visit, the sales conference, the New York Review of Books pitch meeting, the big Barnes & Noble buy—have all lost significance, if they exist at all. Adapting to these changes requires rethinking how we measure success and what formats we prioritize. Paperbacks, metadata, targeted promotion, and digital sales are now critical.

Dan Sinykin’s , published by Columbia, exemplified this shift for me. Ironically, a book about the rise of conglomerates like Penguin Random House over independent publishers, it was positioned and packaged without the trappings of a traditional trade book yet succeeded by all metrics. Some publishers, such as Minnesota and Duke, were already adapting to these changes even before the pandemic. However, New York-based university presses often have broader ambitions due to their proximity to major media. We need to be nimble and ready to capitalize on opportunities when they arise, which is what the team behind did. 

We have the backing of an amazing partner institution. How has NYU supported our publishing and what is our role in supporting the wider NYU community?

Publishing university press books is a business, but it’s not a good business in the pure financial sense. We invest substantial labor into products for a specialized, limited market, which is precisely why we exist. If we didn’t publish specialized monographs, they might not exist—or they would exist without the care they deserve. Outside of the largest AUPresses Group 4s, home institutions provide the resources that enable our work. This makes sense, as we play a vital role in knowledge transmission and faculty professionalization, particularly in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.

One unexpected joy of my job has been joining the senior leadership team of NYU’s Division of Libraries. University libraries are dynamic, central spaces on campus, integral to the scholarship we publish and the preservation of knowledge for future generations. Our position within this ecosystem offers unique opportunities for collaboration: we can support NYU scholars interested in publishing with us or our peers, and we can better tailor our lists to meet the needs of our library colleagues. Additionally, there are exciting possibilities for tech-driven projects.

You’ve been a passionate advocate for University Presses. What makes a UP special? Do you have any advice for authors looking for a publisher?

University presses exist to connect academic authors with an audience, and . For university presses, success is measured less in units sold than in expanding the author’s reach and fostering engagement through the ideas presented. We follow standards established by the AUPresses to ensure scholarly quality, and unlike commercial presses, we do not ask authors to dilute their rigor for sales potential. While sales matter, the scholarly contribution of a book matters more. The university press books that make the most impact are those that become foundational texts for future scholarship. We can never predict which books will have this influence, but they continue to surprise us over time. 

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