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.

I welcome books on education broadly—from early childhood education to higher ed and beyond. Recent titles include Blake R. Silver’s Degrees of Risk: Navigated Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education, Melissa Osborne’s Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility, and Tracy Steffes’s Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education. Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg’s Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online is an education for all of us, no matter how internet-savvy we think we are.

Our wide-ranging sociology list features books of theory, history, mixed methods, longitudinal studies, and more, but its heart belongs to ethnography, as exemplified by Neil Gong’s new book, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles. Mariana Craciun’s From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy provides a beautiful complement to it. We are proud of two new titles about urban neighborhoods: A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio by Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga and a second edition of Rob Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Check out also Ulrike Bialas’s Forever 17: Coming of Age in the German Asylum System, The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, and the Illusion of Public Input by Tony Cheng, and Sharon M. Quinsaat’s Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora.

In music, we are proud to have recently published two provocative new books: Gavin Steingo’s Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music beyond Humanity and Michael Gallope’s The Musician as Philosopher. And Bob Gluck has returned with a new book on Pat Metheny, Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words. My colleague Marta Tonegutti acquires the larger part of the music list, including the critical editions of Verdi, New Material Histories of Music series, and the Opera Lab series.

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 the Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology series, which is now sponsored by Mollie McFee.

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

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