LSE Press is delighted to announce a new publishing partnership with the prestigious LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology series (Department of Anthropology at LSE).

The LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology series was founded in 1949 and has since published over 70 volumes including classic works by Edmund Leach, Raymond Firth, Alfred Gell, Sutti Ortiz, Lucy Mair, Frederik Barth, Maurice Bloch, Peter Van Der Veer and Yunxiang Yan, among other well-known figures.

As one of the most prestigious series in the discipline of Anthropology, the LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology series continues to build on its history with both theoretical and ethnographic studies of the contemporary world through presenting scholarly work from all branches of Social Anthropology.

LSE Press is the School’s Open Access publisher of books and journals. Launched in May 2018, the publishing house is guided by their principles of promoting high-quality research, encouraging and facilitating innovative and experimental publications and enabling free, global access through an Open Access model.

Speaking of the move to publishing with LSE Press, editorial board member and series editor, Mathijs Pelkmans, said: “This move is inspired by our wish to publish our book series with a strong university press. The fact that LSE Press is clearly up-and-coming and is literally ‘at home’ will allow for close and productive collaborations in the years ahead. And importantly, moving the series to LSE Press reaffirms our commitment to publish high quality books in social anthropology, while reaching a wider audience, including through the Press’s open access publishing model.” The series’ Editorial Board members include Pelkmans alongside Prof Deborah James, LSE. Dr Daniel Knight, University of St Andrews, Prof Alpa Shah, LSE / University of Oxford and Dr Harry Walker, LSE.

LSE Press’s head of publishing, Philippa Grand, said: “I’m delighted that the highly prestigious, long-standing LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology series has found a new home with LSE Press. For Anthropology, a subject that is global in its outlook, open access publishing, which allows anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world, access to research, is a perfect fit. We are also thrilled to be able to extend the benefits of publishing this way to early career researchers via this competition.”

Book competition

In celebration of this historic move, LSE Press and LSE Department of Anthropology are holding a competition to support early career anthropologists in publishing their first monograph.

This competition aims to develop the work of new generations of ethnographers who are raising innovative questions vital to the discipline which are grounded in long-term fieldwork.

As the diversity of the LSE Monographs suggests, our judging committee welcome research from a wide range of ethnographic settings, and from diverse anthropological backgrounds.

The competition seeks to reward monographs that use ethnography’s radical commitment to a nuanced empiricism to explore central aspects of human experience. Entries close 30 June 2024.

Competition rules:

1. The closing date for submissions is midnight on 30 June 2024. Applications should be in the form of a book proposal presented on a standard form (available from https://lnkd.in/gYcxgCev ). Along with this, the full manuscript should be submitted. Both documents should be emailed to the series managing editor, Mathijs Pelkmans (M.E.Pelkmans@lse.ac.uk).
2. The manuscript must be between 70,000-90,000 words (including all notes, references, bibliography, and appendices).
3. An expert committee will select up to three manuscripts, to be announced in September 2024. Peer reviews of selected manuscripts will be shared within two months thereafter, and its authors invited to a workshop dedicated to manuscript improvement and revision in November or December 2024.
4. Selected manuscripts will be contracted to be published by LSE Press (in print as well as digitally open access), as part of the relaunched LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology series.
5. While the series is associated with LSE’s Department of Anthropology, we explicitly welcome submissions from authors with other institutional backgrounds and affiliations.
6. Only authors who have not previously published a monograph can submit.
7. Unrevised PhD dissertations will not be considered.
8. At the time of submission the author must confirm that the work is all their own and that the manuscript has not been previously published in its entirety.
9. The book proposal and manuscript can only be submitted if they are not currently under consideration by another publisher. They should not be submitted elsewhere until the outcome of the competition has been announced.