[The following post also speaks to the announcement here on January 17 that
_Central European History_ has moved from Brill to Cambridge University Press.
- Ed.]
 
Another corollary of the debate on transnational perspectives has to do with a
number of narrowing bottlenecks in the publishing world. On the one hand,
humanities and social sciences publishing has until recently remained
remarkably resistant to the allures of the immense _international_ audience
reached by the main _transnational_ (English-language) journals in the natural
sciences. National and regional histories, literatures, languages, film
traditions, cultures, etc. have anchored corresponding regional and national
publishing ventures. In the 1970s, new journals such as the _Sixteenth Century
Studies Journal_ (SCJ) or _Central European Studies_ (CEH) located the study of
(mainly) European history and culture in non-national institutional settings.

The bulk of the articles in the SCJ, published in Kirksville, MO, has been by
North Americans writing on European topics; CEH has had a slightly more diverse
authorship but a more focused subject area., and has until very recently been
published in Europe (Brill Academic Publishers), though not 'central Europe'
(wherever that actually is at any given time). _The Sixteenth Century Journal_,
its editors and its authors--most of whom came originally from Reformation
history and many of them from seminaries--have radically changed the
intellectual landscape of early modern history, just to cite the example of my
discipline. The conference from which this journal grew, the Sixteenth Century
Studies Conference, is now one of the primary venues for early modern history,
literature, theology, music and art history, to name just the main disciplines.
A new breed of observant Jewish historians of Christian theology and/or of the
Protestant Reformation has emerged in this less-normative space (eight of us,
in fact) and new approaches to the Reformation--especially its social history,
e.g. the work of Susan Karant-Nunn--have found their legs at that conference
and in that journal. More young German, British, Swiss and Scandinavian
scholars, especially those who are not entirely satisfied with the traditional
empiricism that still holds sway in most history faculties in those countries,
come to the SCSC every year, and then correspond with Finnish Luther scholars
and Estonians who work in Stockholm about everything from Alltagsgeschichte der
Religion through early German settlement in 'Venezuela' (Coro) to the culture
of Lutheran memory and memorialisation.

How does this 'transnationalisation' of the Reformation relate to other trends
in the academic world? In the case of publishing, I would say that most trends
are running in the opposite direction. More and more is published every year in
English, even by non-British Europeans. English could well overtake German as
the main language in which scholarly debate about early modern German history
and religion is carried out. In addition to the pressure applied by most
publishers to their authors and series editors to publish mainly in English,
the university presses in the English-speaking world are extending their
hegemony into the field of European history. Cambridge and a few others have
always been active here, but recent trends suggest a move away from publishers
located in Europe: North American and British scholars of German history rarely
publish books with publishers located in Germany, for instance, and the trend
is downwards. I would like to suggest a few reasons for this.

The editors of _Central European History_ have, for what I know to be good
reasons, abandoned their European publisher, and by virtue of moving the
journal to Cambridge University Press, would seem to have internalised the
prestige categories of Anglo-American academe. Yet Cambridge, traditionally a
'name of power' when facing a tenure committee, have dropped much of their
serious publishing program, restricted the number of specialised studies they
publish (esp. in early modern history) and have raised book prices
substantially. Brill, the former home of CEH, remain the European publishers
with the most 'reach' in Europe, where their books and journals are purchased
by almost all academic libraries (which is not the case for the products of any
British of American university press). CEH would seem to have decided that it
does not need to address its _European_ readers as much as its
transnational/English-speaking ones. One could argue that this was a choice for
a 'transnational' approach, but I think that will not do (it would be too
weasely a use of the word, for one). I think that this move is in some ways
(the visible ones) an unfortunate example of the populist 'Engfuehrung'
occurring all over the English-speaking world, marked by the abandonment of
European literature programs, the restriction of remaining faculty to language
teaching, and a drift toward generalist books for broader readerships at most
of the university presses. I edit a Brill series, so I am an interested
intervener, but I am also a scholar with a keen interest in the institutional
forms of scholarly publishing, and I think this move is unfortunate--regardless
of the lower prices and other substantial improvements offered by Cambridge.
This is not 'transnationalisation' but rather anglicisation, the high modernist
dream of the 1950s to efface persistent foreign languages like so many
bronchial coughs (German especially, of course!).

There can be no functioning transnationalist project so long as we allow
ourselves to pay blind obeisance to the putative greater rigour of
'double-blind refereeing' and Anglo-American populist aversions to antiquated
luxuries such as discursive footnotes, extended citation of sources in foreign
languages, and publication of appendices and editions in foreign languages.
These things do not appeal in the broader educated anglophone markets that are
now the main target of the university presses (this could be called the
Frenchification of the academic book). Tenure committees regularly tell young
scholars whose books I want to publish that Brill is not serious, their books
are not refereed, etc. Refereeing by editorial committee (and in the case of my
series and many others, by outside reviewers as well) is generally just as
rigorous as the refereeing by 'blind third-party reviewers' that I have
experienced when publishing with Manchester UP and Oxford UP. My editorial
board, for example, consists of senior scholars from the Netherlands, Germany,
Denmark, the USA and Canada. I don't think any university press can boast that
kind of transnational scope or scholarly horsepower in its editorial staff.
Indeed, two of my editors at Brill have doctorates in history. There are other
good examples of journals and publishers that embody the principle of
transnational scholarship--I won't embarrass anyone by leaving them out of a
list--yet they are often considered inferior to the exclusively anglophone
university presses that now routinely publish generalist books lacking serious
scholarly apparatus. That such volumes have often been battered into accepting
a scholarly consensus by reviewers who cannot be approached by the author or in
any way held accountable for their judgments is another story for another
venue--yet I would submit that a truly transnational publishing infrastructure
would need to question the rigid prejudices of the Anglo-American publishing
world and challenge its self-declared monopoly on scholarly rigour. That
infrastructure would also have to operate less hegemonically, i.e., less in
English and more in other languages.

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