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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 Melissa Osborne’s Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility, Susan Thomas’s Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University, Roseann Liu’s Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve, Tracy Steffes’s Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education, and Larry Cuban’s The Enduring Classroom: Teaching Then and Now. 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, no matter how internet-savvy we think we are.

Our wide-ranging sociology list features books of theory, history, mixed methods, longitudinal studies, and more, but its heart belongs to ethnography, as exemplified by Neil Gong’s new book, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles. 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 two provocative new books: Gavin Steingo’s Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music beyond Humanity and Michael Gallope’s The Musician as Philosopher. 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 sponsored by Kyle Wagner. And until 2021, I acquired the Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology series, which is now 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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