Penn State University Press
Series Editors: Judith Yaross Lee & Tracy Wuster
From Benjamin Franklin to Mark Twain, Mel Brooks to Richard Pryor, Our Gang to Inside Amy Schumer, American humor has time and again proven itself to be more than mere entertainment: it has brought cultural norms and practices in America into sharp relief and, sometimes, successfully changed them. The Humor in America series considers humor as anexpression that reflects key concerns of people in specific times and places.
The series engages the full range of the field, from literature, theater, and stand-up comedy to comics, radio, and other media in which humor addresses American experiences. With interdisciplinary research, historical and transnational approaches, and comparative scholarship that carefully examines contexts such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and region, books in the Humor in America series show how the artistic and cultural expression of humor both responds to and shapes American culture. The series will publish mainly authored volumes-although we will consider edited collections-and will appeal to audiences that include scholars, students, and the intellectually curious general reader.
Questions or submissions should be directed to the series editors at: [email protected] and
Judith Yaross Lee is Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Charles E. Zumkehr Professor of Rhetoric & Culture in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (recently retired), and the author, most recently, of Twain's Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture.
Tracy Wuster teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the director of the Humor in American Project at UT and the executive director of the American Humor Studies Association. He is the author of Mark Twain, American Humorist.
Proposals should take the form of a three- to five-page proposal outlining the intent of the project, its scope and relation to other work on the topic, and the likely audience(s) for the book. Please also include a current CV. The editors note that although it is a logical fallacy to expect scholarship on humor to be funny, the best humor scholarship can be fun- and illuminate its exemplars' comic spirit-while also being intellectually rigorous and a pleasure to read.
Series Editorial BoardDarryl Dickson‐Carr
Southern MethodistUniversity
Joanne Gilbert
Alma College
Rebecca Krefting
Skidmore College
Bruce Michelson
Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
Nicholas Sammond
University of Toronto
