Cambridge University Press is partnering with GOBI Library Solutions on a series of blog posts to give our customer insights into our Hot Topics collections.

Hot Topics from Cambridge are tailored collections of ebooks, produced to showcase the latest trends in research. They allow the reader to explore pertinent research topics, choosing from a wide range of subjects in both Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and in Humanities and Social Sciences.

For the last installment of our project, we’re exploring the Gender Studies collection. Here, you will find popular titles like A Century of Votes for Women by Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder, and The Logics of Gender Justice by Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon – both of which explore the place of women in society and democracy throughout history.

We spoke to one of the senior editors at Cambridge University Press, Sara Doskow, about Gender Studies.

Why is Gender Studies content relevant and how can librarians benefit from these collections?

We choose topics at the center of international debates and societal transformations. Gender remains a major axis of social inequality, and it has also gained new salience as a political identity. This is also an area where a multi-disciplinary collection can add particular value: different academic disciplines offer different tools and theoretical frameworks that are important for gaining a more complete understanding.  

All of our Hot Topics reflect the latest research trends in their given subject areas. How do we select what title to include? What parameters do editors follow?

Our approach was pluralistic, but in general we focused on picking books that tackle big questions in rigorous ways. Books draw on different methods, data sources, and theoretical frameworks.

How are these collections different from similar ones from competitors?

I hope that our collection complements like collections of other publishers and contributes to the collective endeavor of building knowledge on this front. The breadth and rigor of CUP’s publishing – and our attention to selecting books that tackle big questions – ensure that CUP’s collection will be an important resource.

What is your favorite part when creating these bespoke collections?

I enjoy getting to take a step back and think about how different books speak to one another, sometimes in unexpected ways. 

What title did you enjoy the most working on? Why?

This is a tough one! I feel privileged to have worked on many, but I will speak about two in particular if you will allow me. It was exciting to work on A Century of Votes for Women by Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder on the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the US and on the eve of a historic election. The book tracks how women (and men) have cast their ballots over the last 100 years, showing great variation among women; it reveals both how women were shaped by their times and their broader social contexts and how popular understandings of women shaped campaigns and contemporaneous analysis.

I also learned a great deal from working on Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon’s prize-winning book, The Logics of Gender Justice. The book compares state action on women’s rights across 70 countries and many decades to reveal how different categories of women’s rights involve different histories, trigger different societal conflicts, and activate different sets of protagonists. The book offers a critical framework for thinking about the multiple and complex pathways to greater gender justice and the associated opportunities and obstacles.

This post was produced in collaboration with EBSCO and GOBI Library Solutions. For more information, click here.