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Elizabeth Branch Dyson

Assistant Editorial Director, Executive Editor

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 Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy by Sigal Ben-PorathReforming the Reform: Problems of Public Schooling in the American Welfare State by Susan L. Moffitt, Michaela Krug O’Neill, and David K. Cohen, and Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools by Natasha Warikoo. And 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.

Our wide-ranging sociology list features books of theory, history, mixed methods, longitudinal studies, and more, but its heart belongs to ethnography. Two new titles about jobs after college surprise in different ways: Jessi Streib’s The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay after College and John D. Skrentny’s Wasted Education: How We Fail Our Graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Asylum seekers experience remarkably diverse receptions in Ulrike Bialas’s Forever 17: Coming of Age in the German Asylum System and Katherine Jensen’s The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil. And these three new titles feature bold sociological takes on some of today’s most important issues: The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, and the Illusion of Public Input by Tony Cheng, The Sociology of Housing: How Homes Shape Our Social Lives edited by Brian J. McCabe and Eva Rosen, and The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace by Kevin Woodson.

In music, we are proud to have recently published Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM by Paul Steinbeck and Experimenting the Human: Art, Music, and the Contemporary Posthuman by G Douglas Barrett. 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 being sponsored by Kyle Wagner. And until 2021, I acquired the Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology series, which is now being 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.

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