James Currey has long been recognized as one of the leading publishers of academic books on Africa. To mark the 40th anniversary of the well-established imprint, we hear from some of our African Studies authors and series editors…
James Currey has been known almost since its inception as a leader in African Studies. Over the years, the imprint has gone from strength to strength, encompassing not only literary studies but film studies, cultural studies, history, anthropology, development studies, politics and economics and environmental studies. With our latest series, Law, Justice and Society in Africa, we look forward to continuing the tradition of making the best scholarship on Africa available to a wide audience, both within the continent and beyond.
Megan Milan
Commissioning Editor, James Currey
JCP’s dedication to a single area of scholarly study offers writers a rare privilege that few other presses can: the opportunity to work with editors with a deep knowledge of Africa’s diverse cultures, histories, and literatures. In an era when market pressures compel publishers to cast wide nets, few presses provide such specialized expertise. Whether first time author or seasoned veteran, the pay-off is the highest caliber books in their field. JCP’s outstanding catalogue should remind everyone of the enduring value of, dare I say, old-fashioned ways of making books.
Matthew J. Christensen, Author
Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
For forty years, James Currey has created spaces for specialist scholarly research and opened up new fields in African Studies. Back in 2000 there was no question about who should publish my first book, Ghanaian Popular Fiction, and I have been connected with James Currey ever since as an editor of the African Articulations monograph series, as an editorial board member for the journal ALT, and as an author. African Studies is thriving and James Currey’s lists showcase the wealth of new scholarship.
Stephanie Newell, Author & Series Editor
Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s – 1960s
Since 2022, we are publishing the series Future Rural Africa with James Currey. Within two years we managed to get four books published and a good number more are in the pipeline. They deal with aspirations and future-oriented policies on and for the rural parts of the African continent and attempt to explain how such future oriented policies addressing climate change as much as economic development and political participation shape present day everyday lives. The highly efficient and always cordial ways of handling manuscripts of authors, who are often publishing a monograph for the first time, has been a true asset to make this series a success. Megan Milan, and before her Jaqueline Mitchell, have been enormously helpful and knowledgeable experts with James Currey helping us to turn manuscripts into wonderful books.
Michael Bollig, Series Editor
University of Cologne (for the Collaborative Research Centre Future Rural Africa)
Future Rural Africa
James Currey Publishing was at its founding, and remains, the only publisher to focus on African Studies alone. Founded in 1984, one of the key imperatives from the start was to publish books on Africa by Africans alongside those of scholars elsewhere, and to ensure those books on Africa were available on the continent. This has been enabled through a long tradition of co-publication with African publishers, and working with NGOs and research organisations, so that JCP books are sold in Africa at affordable local prices. These direct links have been not only a source of books (JCP also co-publishes books that originated with African publishers), but an important part of the sustainability of the imprint and one we are proud to continue to uphold.
Authors are drawn to JCP because of its focus on African Studies, confident that editors and others who handle their books through the publishing process have a deep knowledge of and interest in the subject. As a mark of the imprint’s standing, since 2017 all books published have been available to view at the James Currey Collection at St Cross College, Oxford. Here are copies from its first authors, among them Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ali Mazrui, Basil Davidson and Terence Ranger, every volume of African Literature Today and African Theatre, James Currey’s own Africa Writes Back, telling the story of the imprint he founded and the place of African Studies in publishing, alongside new scholars and today’s prizewinning authors, among them Suad Musa, Stephanie Newell, Emily Bridger, Joost Fontein, Carli Coetzee, Madhu Krishnan and Getnet Bekele.
Today, African Studies has increased in its impact and importance in a globally connected world, and the imprint looks to publish books not only on the history and development of Africa, but on the agency of Africa and its politics and environment in a contested world of rapid change. Just as 40 years ago, we strive to make James Currey Publishers as relevant as ever in the African Studies community which it continues to serve.
Jaqueline Mitchell
Commissioning Editor, James Currey, 2012 – 2023
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