MUP appoints new directors, editorial advisory board
Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) has appointed two new directors to its board, and announced eight members of its new editorial advisory board.
Former managing director of Oxford University Press Australia Sandra McComb and former CEO of Penguin Random House Asia Pacific Gabrielle Coyne were appointed as MUP’s board directors.
McComb has more than 14 years’ experience in university publishing, including as executive director of Cambridge University Press Australia and New Zealand, while Coyne served with Penguin for a decade and has previously held board roles at Pearson Education Australia, the Wheeler Centre and Australian Book Review.
The MUP board also appointed eight members of its new editorial advisory board, who will work with staff to ‘expand MUP’s catalogue of academic titles over the next three years’, according to a statement from the publisher.
The members are:
- Jon Barnett (geography, planning, urban studies)
- Jeff Borland (economics)
- Mark Davis (culture and communication)
- Anne Dunlop (art history)
- Mark Edele (history)
- Cordelia Fine (business studies, gender and cultural studies)
- Julie McLeod (education)
- Julie Willis (architecture).
Editorial advisory board members are all academics from the University of Melbourne, but MUP says it expects to add members from other universities and other fields at its April meeting.
MUP says the establishment of the editorial advisory board is in line with the publisher’s ‘new focus on research and teaching strengths of the university’. It follows the resignation of former CEO Louise Adler and five independent directors of the MUP board in late January, after the university proposed a new direction for MUP that would see it focus more on scholarly publishing.
The MUP board is expected to announce a new CEO in the coming months.
MUP chair Warren Bebbington said that the editorial advisory board has ‘an initial emphasis on fields that rely more heavily on the published book. For other fields, including health and the sciences, most scholarship and research circulates almost exclusively online. With the launch of MUP Open, our new open access imprint, these fields will be well represented.’
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Category: Local news
