Meet our acquisitions team! In this series of blog posts, learn a little bit more about our acquisitions editors: Tyler Cloherty, Erin Sweany, and Emily Winkler.
Emily Winkler
Emily is a cultural historian of medieval Europe. After receiving interdisciplinary degrees in Medieval Studies, History and Classics at Dartmouth (USA), she moved to the UK and earned her D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford. The author and editor of several books on medieval history, Emily is currently Principal Investigator of a team research project based at Oxford. The project explores historical thinking in medieval Britain across different languages and genres. Her research interests range widely across the high medieval past, including historical writing, emotion, history of ideas, emotion and health, society, political thought and material culture. She enjoys teaching writing to history students, collaborating with history teachers on creating new resources for history and working with history writers of all ages on steering the craft of prose.
Emily welcomes book proposals from researchers in late antique, medieval and early modern history and related fields, based on original research into the primary materials of the past—whether document, text, object or idea. This could be a book that rediscovers little-known sources and shares their importance with a wider audience, that asks and answers exciting new questions about well-known sources or that advances an inventive new method for finding out what it meant to be human in the medieval past. "Most importantly," Emily says, "I'm looking for a book with a spark! Any book that will make an exciting and original contribution to premodern studies."
Emily particularly loves talking with authors and editors about their ideas and learning new things from them about the premodern world. "I especially enjoy helping authors and editors find creative ways to communicate their ideas with readers through the publishing process," Emily explains, "from discussing the intellectual frame of a book, to finding a really good title!" Her best advice for monograph authors is, "Say what your research question is, and why it matters. Different countries have different expectations for what a book should be, but the one constant is that it needs to be your original work of scholarship." If, on the other hand, you are collecting essays for an edited book, she says, "Think less about the book as a finished product (collecting papers already given from a conference, thinking about work your colleagues have already done). Think about what you want the book to do, after it has been published."
Authors and editors looking for a prospective publisher for their book should really consider MIP, Emily argues: "It’s a personal process with a global reach. Publishing with MIP means working with the friendly community of a small university press, while helping your work gain an international audience through the major international scholarly publisher, De Gruyter. Previous MIP authors and editors have highlighted MIP/De Gruyter’s digital distribution as a key advantage. I personally like the clear style of the books’ printing and presentation, because it helps an author’s ideas get across to readers simply and directly: for example, footnotes instead of endnotes, a readable font, good-sized margins, and beautiful colour images." (One MIP book Emily really likes, and recommends to readers and scholars, is Anglo-Danish Empire: A Companion to the Reign of King Cnut the Great, edited by Richard North, Erin Goeres and Alison Finlay (2022): "For me, the real highlight is the range of primary sources that come to life: text, building, chronicle, artefact, landscape, church, gift, legend, weapon, law, and map!")
All of our acquisitions editors will all be at the 2023 International Congress for Medieval Studies, so please find one of them for a chat if you have questions about publishing with MIP or about our books! You can also fill out a prospective projects form and one of our editors will follow up with you to learn more. To contact Emily, you can drop her a line by email: "I’m happy to discuss your project with you informally at any stage of its development, whether it’s a near-completed doctoral project you’d like to work up into a book, or a book you think you’d like to write."
This summer, you can also find Emily in person at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (July 3–6, 2023, UK) and the International Congress of Celtic Studies in Utrecht (July 24–28, 2023, the Netherlands). Emily says, "I’m also a regular attendee of the Haskins Society conference, held every autumn in the USA (this year University of Richmond, Virginia). Please contact me if you’d like to set up a meeting in-person at one of these conferences, or to arrange a virtual video chat to discuss your work!"