Health Humanities Series

Questions of health are more urgent than ever. The new Hopkins Health Humanities Series at Johns Hopkins University Press aims to set a research agenda for the health humanities through innovative new scholarship on health rooted within and across disciplines such as history, philosophy, literary and language studies, rhetoric, and more.

We are interested in projects that aim to understand, evaluate, and critique the nature of health, health systems, health care, and approaches to the body, broadly construed.

We invite manuscript proposals and inquiries about projects at any stage of development.

Series editors

Colleen Derkatch is Professor of Rhetoric and Interim Chair in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research and teaching focus on rhetorical theory and criticism, particularly rhetoric of science, health, and medicine, as well as the health humanities and science and technology studies. Derkatch’s books include Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016). She has published articles in a range of journals such as Canadian Food Studies; Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine; Rhetoric of Health & Medicine; and Technical Communication Quarterly.

Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and History at Drexel University.  A historian and theorist of the face and body, Pearl has published widely on Victorian history of medicine, media and religion, and critical race, gender, and disability studies. Her recently released book Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Superrecognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) is the third in her face trilogy, following Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 2010).  She also has a trade book forthcoming on “The Mask” with Bloomsbury Academic. Pearl maintains an active freelance profile, with bylines in a variety of newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, Lilith, and Real Life Magazine.  

Submission Guidelines

Proposals and inquiries can be submitted to the series co-editors Colleen Derkatch (derkatch@torontomu.ca) and Sharrona Pearl (sharronapearl@gmail.com) or to Matthew McAdam, Executive Acquisitions Editor at Johns Hopkins University Press (mxm@press.jhu.edu).

We invite you to start with an initial inquiry with a sentence or two about the subject of your book project, its field and/or the broader conversations it intersects with, and something about yourself.

After that initial query, we may ask for a book proposal, sample chapter, and cv. We suggest a maximum of 6500 words for your proposal. The proposal should include the following things about the project: 

  • Working title and a brief description. Tell us about the book. What is its subject, the problem you wish to address, and the question you hope to answer? 
  • Context and reason for writing. Why is this book important now? Who will want to read it? How will this book help them?
  • Competing books. What books is yours in conversation with? 
  • The proposed manuscript. Is the manuscript still an idea or nearly complete? When do you anticipate its completion? Estimate the length (in words). Tell us about any illustrations, tables, maps, or graphs that are editorially necessary for the book to make its point. 
  • You, the author. Why are you the right person to write this book? 
  • Table of contents. Annotate each chapter with what you plan to say in it.
  • Suggested reviewers. Provide a list of 4-5 potential reviewers, including their names, affiliations, research areas, and email addresses. This will help us situate your project and streamline the process if we send your project for peer review.

For more information, see the Johns Hopkins University Press submission guidelines.

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