2012
Our inaugural event helped to celebrate the Association’s 75th anniversary. US President Jimmy Carter, who had proclaimed the first University Press Week in 1978, welcomed our plans for an annual event beginning in 2012, saying that “The special character and contribution of university presses should be better known and better supported.”
Our very first blog tour kicked off with posts from 26 member presses, written by authors, book review editors, university press staff members, booksellers, and university press advocates. More than 100 books, journals, online collections, and reference works were featured in our Fine Print (and Digital!) online gallery.
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2013: Ideas Unbound
We celebrated innovation in scholarly publishing with a blog tour featuring posts from 37 participating presses; an online gallery full of exemplary university press publications; and a panel discussion among leaders from Columbia University Press, MIT Press, and the Modern Language Association.
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2014: Great Minds Don’t Think Alike
This year’s celebration centered on the collaborative aspects of university press publishing. A tagline contest elicited our slogan, above, capturing a defining aspect of both member presses and the work they publish.
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2015: Surprising!
University presses are surprising in many ways: who they are, what they publish, how they publish.
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2016: Community
Community is at the center of university press missions: from the community of a discipline to a regional home and culture, from the shared discourse of a campus to a bookstore’s community of readers.
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2017: #LookItUP: Knowledge Matters
Valuing expertise and knowledge can feel like a radical act in 2017. University presses not only believe in facts and knowledge, but traffic in them daily, publishing approximately 14,000 books and more than 1,100 journals each year, read by people around the globe.
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2018: #TurnItUP
The university press community amplifies voices, disciplines, and communities.
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2019: Read. Think. Act.
This year we encouraged readers to explore research on topics that affect everyone and to reflect on what they read, in the hope that the work of university presses bringing scholarship to readers will stimulate positive conversations and actions in the world.
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2020: #RaiseUP
This year’s theme highlighted the role that university presses play in elevating authors, subjects, and whole disciplines—in partnership with booksellers, librarians, and others—bringing new perspectives, ideas, and voices to readers around the globe
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2021: #KeepUP
This year marked the tenth anniversary of UP Week and we celebrated how university presses have evolved over the past decade. We proudly honored the forward-thinking work that has made university presses leaders in their fields and a force to keep up with!
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2022: #NextUP
As University Press Week entered its second decade of celebrating excellence in university press publishing, the theme Next UP reflected university presses’ spirit of constant learning, adaptation, and evolution.
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2023: #SpeakUP
This year’s UP Week provided an opportunity for presses and their supporters to shout to the rooftops about the value of the essential work of university presses: giving voice to the scholarship and ideas that shape conversations around the world.