AAUP Announces Election of Peter Dougherty to Presidency
NEW YORK, NY—On June 20, 2012, Princeton University Press director Peter Dougherty assumed leadership of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP). Dougherty will serve a one-year term as the Association’s president. He succeeds MaryKatherine Callaway, director of Louisiana State University Press, who will remain on the AAUP board of directors.
Formally established in 1937, AAUP promotes the work and influence of university presses, provides cooperative marketing opportunities, and helps its more than 130 member presses fulfill their common commitments to scholarship, the academy, and society. The president of AAUP serves as a spokesperson for and an advocate of university presses and works with the executive director and board of directors to set the direction and immediate goals of the organization.
Dougherty began his publishing career as a sales rep with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, where he was later named sociology editor. Dougherty continued in editorial roles at McGraw-Hill, W.H. Freeman, St. Martin’s, Basil Blackwell, and the Free Press, before joining Princeton in 1992 as senior economics editor. At Princeton, Dougherty rose to group publisher for the social sciences and then director in 2005.
During his tenure at Princeton, he has developed an academically distinguished and financially robust list of titles, including books from seven Nobel Prize-winning economists. Dougherty himself has been published by Wiley: Who’s Afraid of Adam Smith? (2002).
He has served on the AAUP board of directors since 2009, and was a member of the Program Committee for the 2002 Annual Meeting. Dougherty is also active outside the university press community, sitting on the boards of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Princeton Public Library Foundation as well. He writes and lectures often about scholarly publishing, as well as economic culture and the culture of economics. His articles have appeared in publications from the Financial Times to the Chronicle of Higher Education to the Los Angeles Times.
In his inaugural address at the 2012 AAUP Annual Meeting in Chicago, Dougherty described his vision of “the next chapter in university press publishing, […] the global university press.” Noting the ever-increasing literacy, democracy, and scholarship of the developing world, Dougherty reminds us that “in a digital culture that granulates knowledge, books synthesize it. […] In a digital culture that disaggregates community, books catalyze it. The far-ranging discussions that careen around the web need to be structured, situated, and brought to center. Books provide this anchor.”
Media Inquiries:
Regan Colestock
rcolestock@aaupnet.org
212-989-1010 x24