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Dawn Durante

@dawnd.bsky.social
2.3K followers 944 following 407 posts

Editorial Director at @uncpress.bsky.social • acquiring books in history, Black studies, girlhood studies, carceral studies • H-Net's #FeedingTheElephant

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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
This #BannedBooksWeek, #FeedingTheElephant acknowledges resources to #LetBooksBe as well as efforts to preserve and protect the larger data and information landscape, including ways to volunteer. networks.h-net.org/group/discus...
networks.h-net.org
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mary-elizabeth murphy @jimcrowcapital.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I'm so sad to miss @asalh-bhm.bsky.social this year, but I see Policing Passengers! 🎉 Plus many books cited in it!
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American Sociological Association @asanews.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The new book edited by ASA members Jonathan Coley @jonathancoley.bsky.social and Golshan Golriz brings together work by leading scholars of social movements, religion, and gender and sexuality to better understand the activism of the queer faithful. @uncpress.bsky.social
bit.ly
LGBTQ Religious Activism
Despite the LGBTQ movement’s rapid growth and significant policy successes over the past few decades, many mainstream religions continue to discriminate ag...
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UNC Press @uncpress.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Are you writing a book about food justice and race? Learn more about our Black Food Justice series with series editor Ashanté Reese and @lucaschurch.bsky.social next week at this online lunch and learn👇 utexas.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Congratulations to all the finalists!
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I’m honored to serve as a judge for @asalh-bhm.bsky.social’s Felix Armfield Dissertation Lightning Round Competition at #ASALH2026.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
It was a great first day at #ASALH2026! Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth today. Looking forward to catching up with more people tomorrow!
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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 19/09/2026
The Kennedy Center was financially stable until Trump took over: "In the fiscal year ending in 2024, when the center was led by President Deborah Rutter and a bipartisan board of trustees, it brought in about $40 million more than it spent" www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...
theatlantic.com
What the Kennedy Center’s Tax Return Reveals
A previously unseen filing captures the state of the institution seven months after Donald Trump’s takeover.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Such great advice! It is also useful for editors trying to learn more about your work. If I see an interesting panel in a conference program, for example, I’ll look someone up. What I find online can confirm if that scholar’s work lines up with my acquisitions work and inform whether I reach out.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Earlier this week, an author told me how helpful they were finding all the #PeerReviewWeek info that was circulating! Here’s what #FeedingtheElephant added to the Peer Review Week mix.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
And hitting the @uncpress.bsky.social book exhibit at the @asalh-bhm.bsky.social conference next week!
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Amazing! Thank you!
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
😂
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Rachel Shelden @rachelshelden.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Terrific review of SUPREMACY by @nikobowie.bsky.social and @daphnarenan.bsky.social alongside my book, THE POLITICAL SUPREME COURT: 
Picture of this quotation from Pema Levy’s article “How the Supreme Court seized power to rule over the rest of us”:

“As Bowie, Renan, and Shelden show, this is not how its always been, or how it's supposed to be. To take back their power, the people must simply demand it.”
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
And my picture does not do the cover justice. It is even more gorgeous IRL!
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It is also the first book in @uncpress.bsky.social’s Black Women’s History series, edited by @drashleydfarmer.bsky.social, Talitha LeFlouria, and Daina Ramey Berry.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Congratulations to Kathryn Benjamin Golden! THIS INSURGENT GROUND: Black Women, Marronage, and Rebellion in the Great Dismal Swamp is out in the world! This is a tremendously well-written and insightful history of Black women’s fugitive world making.
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Monica L. Mercado @monicalmercado.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
"To understand Dolly, you have to read her as a writer. Writing her own story was the most radical, precise way to define herself in a world that kept trying to fit her into a box." -- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Greatest Story Dolly Parton Ever Wrote Was Herself
She didn’t see herself as a saint; she identified as something we needed even more: a writer.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
It’s Library Card Sign-Up Month. Do it for Dolly, forever our literacy queen.
ala.org
Library Card Sign-up Month
September is Library Card Sign-up Month, a time when the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries nationwide join together to remind parents, caregivers and students that signing up for a libr...
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I love seeing this when it happens to authors I’m working with, especially between proposal and manuscript.
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Paul Renfro @renfro.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Here's a really thoughtful and generous review of THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RYAN WHITE in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. Many thanks to the great Jonathan Bell for taking the time to read and sit with my book. 🗃️
The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America. By Paul M. Renfro. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024. Pp. 216. $99.00 cloth; $24.95 paperback; $19.99 ebook)

More than fifteen hundred mourners attended the funeral of Indiana teenager Ryan White in April 1990, including First Lady Barbara Bush, pop superstars Michael Jackson and Elton John, and talk show host Phil Donaghue. Hundreds more, unable to squeeze into the enormous Indianapolis church, observed from outside. White gave his name to a landmark federal bill, the Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, passed the year of his death. The source of his fame was simple: a hemophiliac, he had contracted HIV after a transfusion with contaminated blood and was diagnosed as positive for the virus just as he turned thirteen. He therefore soon became a poster child for "innocent" Americans living with HIV during the early years of the epidemic, who could be contrasted with other stigmatized populations who bore the brunt of the public health crisis. As Paul Renfro explains in this sensitively told account, White's status "as a white, midwestern, middle-class, cisgender, superficially able-bodied teenager," together with the fact that he had contracted HIV "through no fault of his own … helped make him a vulnerable and sympathetic 'AIDS victim,' one who could conceivably assimilate into mainstream, 'normal' society" (p. 12).Renfro uses the case study of Ryan White as a route to explore the multiple structural inequalities that rendered the HIV-AIDS crisis so challenging for American society and the political system during the 1980s. While hemophilia was one of the early markers of HIV transmission in the so-called "4-H club" (alongside homosexuals, IV drug (heroin) users, and Haitians), it offered a path to political respectability during the crisis that the others clearly lacked. In the words of a 1986 report of the New York City Commission on Human Rights' AIDS Discrimination Unit, prejudice "against racial and ethnic minorities ('they're all on welfare'), homosexuals ('they're only f--s'), immigrants ('they're taking our jobs away'), sexually active women ('she's a w---e and deserves what she gets') and drug users ('they're nothing but junkies anyway') interferes with our ability to respond to AIDS as a health crisis."1

White, by contrast, had contracted HIV as a result of the development of the industrialization and commodification of blood products. New technologies in freezing blood and plasma from multiple donors allowed recipients to infuse themselves at home, while simultaneously exposing them to risks of viral contamination the industry did little to prevent. Far from engaging in behaviors that attracted the opprobrium of many Americans, including non-heterosexual sex and drug use, Ryan White had trusted a for-profit medical infrastructure that had failed him. At the same time, he also experienced prejudice and discrimination as fearful parents and school board members in his hometown of Kokomo, Indiana, went to great lengths to exclude him from school. His story allows Renfro to explore the interplay of problematic dynamics separating popular presumptions of innocence and guilt, able-bodiedness and disability, media publicity and invisibility, and valorized and stigmatized identities in US society in the Reagan era. Renfro has conducted exhaustive archival research, a task made more daunting in the context of the COVID pandemic during which he carried out much of the work for the book. He writes with empathy and compassion, together with an economy of style that results in a rich and wide-ranging portrait of a multifaceted public health crisis in a mere 136 pages. The book is a valuable addition not just to the growing historical literature on the HIV-AIDS crisis itself but also to the larger historiography on the politics of the 1980s and the multiple inequalities that characterize the modern United States.

JONATHAN BELL is professor of US History at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. He is the author or editor of several books and is currently completing a study of the relationship between LGBTQ rights politics and the US healthcare system since the 1970s.
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KEW @kidadaewilliams.com · 13/08/2026
If you're prepping your syllabi and other class materials on African American history and culture, don't forget about the NMAAHC's amazing 'Searchable Museum,' which uses artifacts from Smithsonian collections. It even includes resources for teaching this history. www.searchablemuseum.com #edusky
searchablemuseum.com
Homepage
A museum that seeks to understand American history through the lens of the African American experience.
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Citizen.Coping @propcazhpm.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
"Authors who are currently completing a book-length manuscript on Black women’s history are encouraged to apply to the Black Women’s History Series Incubator." August 31: Application Deadline October 15: Selected author will be notified *Please include alt-text. #Historians #Blackademics
uncpress.org
Black Women’s History Series Incubator
The editors of the Black Women’s History series invite applications for the series’ annual incubator. Authors who are currently completing a book-length
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
“Along with the Morrison and le Carré, Obama has chosen The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren.”
theguardian.com
Barack Obama launches podcast about books that ‘shaped his worldview’
The former US president will host six episodes of A Great Book for Audible, discussing work from Toni Morrison and John le Carré to James Baldwin
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Caelyn Cobb @caelyncobb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
We're hiring for an entry-level position in our Rights & Contracts department. A great opportunity to get publishing experience, especially for people interested in translation and foreign publishing markets! opportunities.columbia.edu/jobs/subsidi...
opportunities.columbia.edu
Subsidiary Rights Assistant - Other NYC Locations, New York, United States
Job Type: Support Staff - Non-Union Regular/Temporary: Regular Hours Per Week: 35 Standard Work Schedule: Monday-Friday, 9-5 Building: Off campus near Lincoln Center Salary Range: 47,792.00-47,792.00 ...
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
The implications and consequences are just dizzying.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
static.klipy.com
Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls: The Limit Does Not Exist!
ALT: Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls: The Limit Does Not Exist!
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UNC Press @uncpress.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
It's the last day of #ASA2026! If you haven't made it to our booth yet, be sure to stop by today before 12pm or visit our virtual exhibit 👇 uncpress.org/amsocioassn-virtual-ex…
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Pub day!!!! ✨💫📚🌟
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Inside Higher Ed @insidehighered.com · 07/08/2026
Student Success | How HBCUs Are Redefining Student Success From helping stopped-out students return to creating faster routes to graduate school, HBCUs are removing barriers at every stage of college. bit.ly/4hlFDfa #EDUSky #AcademicSky #HigherEd
University students sitting on the steps on campus talking to each other animatedly.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Ha! Yes.
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UNC Press @uncpress.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
A moving remembrance of Johanna Fernández from @democracynow.org reflecting on her life, scholarship, activism, and extraordinary work preserving the history and legacy of the Young Lords 💚 www.democracynow.org/2026/8/4/joh...
democracynow.org
Johanna Fernández Dies at 55: Leading Scholar on the Young Lords & Latinx Freedom Movement
We look at the life and legacy of Dominican American historian, activist and prison abolitionist Dr. Johanna Fernández, who died on July 30 after a long battle with cancer. She was 55 years old. As a ...
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Congratulations to ArCasia D. James-Gallaway. Advance copies of her book, ORDINARY SITES: Student Resistance and the 1970s Texas School Desegregation Struggle, just arrived @uncpress.bsky.social.
uncpress.org
Ordinary Sites
For nearly a century, legal battles over school desegregation have attracted significant attention. What desegregation meant for the day-to-day lives of Blac...
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Eric Harvey @ericdharvey.com · 06/08/2026
only flipped though so far this but it appears to be 🔥
W. Jason Miller’s new book about Langston Hughes, Nina Simone and the black power movement
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Joel Pinckney @jpinckney.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Man this looks good, hadn't seen this one yet. Coming in September from @uncpress.bsky.social.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
And more congratulations are in order for @drashleydfarmer.bsky.social, coeditor extraordinaire of @uncpress.bsky.social's Black Women's History series, whose biography of Queen Mother Audley Moore (Pantheon Books) is on the MAAH Stone Book Award shortlist.
maahstonebookaward.org
Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore — MAAH Stone Book Award
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Antwain K. Hunter's book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865 (@uncpress.bsky.social), has also be shortlisted for the MAAH Stone Book Award!
maahstonebookaward.org
A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865 — MAAH Stone Book Award
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Congratulations to Augustus Wood! His book Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression under Gentrification (@uncpress.bsky.social, Justice, Power, and Politics series) has been shortlisted for the Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award!
maahstonebookaward.org
Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression under Gentrification — MAAH Stone Book Award
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Congratulations to Ashley Howard for being named a 2026 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader! If you haven't read Ashley's book, Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement (@uncpress.bsky.social), this is your sign to pick up her award-winning book.
cands.org
2026 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Named – C&S
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Samantha Brennan @samanthabrennan.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
"Wyoming will become the first state in the US where you cannot receive a B.A. in Philosophy." dailynous.com/2026/07/23/u...
dailynous.com
University of Wyoming to Drop Philosophy Major - Daily Nous
As for Fall 2027, incoming students at the University of Wyoming will no longer be allowed to major in philosophy. The news was shared by philosophy professor Bradley Rettler in posts on social media....
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Dr. Jessica Lepler @jlepler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Registration is now open for my "Bookworm" webinar with @clementslibrary.bsky.social on September 18, 10-11:30 AM. I can't wait to discuss "Canal Dreamers" with the good folks at the University of Michigan! Registration is free: events.umich.edu/event/149188 @uncpress.bsky.social #skystorians 🗃️
events.umich.edu
Bookworm #95 - Author Conversation with Jessica M. Lepler, "Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions" | Happening @ Michigan
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
The series editors, @drashleydfarmer.bsky.social, Talitha LeFlouria, and Daina Ramey Berry, are accepting applications until August 31, 2026.
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Dawn Durante @dawnd.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
ICYMI: The Black Women’s History series is accepting applications for its annual incubator. The incubator provides support for developing projects that center the voices and experiences of Black women using a historical methodology. #CFP #skystorians
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SHEAR @shearites.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Congratulations to Lauren Duval winner of The Mary Kelley Prize in Gender & Women’s History for The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence. (@uncpress.bsky.social)
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SHEAR @shearites.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Congratulations to Craig Thompson Friend winner of The James C. Bradford Best Biography Prize for Becoming Lunsford Lane: The Lives of an American Aeneas. (@uncpress.bsky.social)
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SHEAR @shearites.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Congratulations to Lauren Duval the second winner (not finalist!) for The SHEAR Book Prize for The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence. (@uncpress.bsky.social)
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Association of University Presses @aupresses.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
What are some examples of digital projects? bit.ly/3JrWl8g University press publishers answer frequently asked questions like this one on our #AskUP site. Curious about how university press publishing works? #AskUP!
Ask UP logo, tagline: Authors seeking knowledge from university presses
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UNC Press @uncpress.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Although we wish we were in Chile for #NAISA2026 we still have a virtual exhibit, a conference discount, and a message from editor, Andreina Fernandez! uncpressblog.com/2026/07/22/2...
uncpressblog.com
2026 Native American & Indigenous Studies Association Annual Meeting - UNC Press Blog
Although UNC Press will not be attending the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association annual meeting in-person this year, you can still visit our virtual booth to browse our recent titles on d...
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Monica L. Mercado @monicalmercado.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
There is one grant on this list of 81 projects that specifically focuses on the history of women and girls and that is just my tiny sigh for the day.
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