Publishing with Purpose, Since 1969. University of Alberta Press connects communities of knowledge, to inform, inspire, and innovate.
Whether it’s a bold new book, digital project, or open-access resource, we publish peer-reviewed publications, to enhance the intellectual and social impact of research and knowledge, fuel solutions to practical problems, and connect ideas with inquisitive audiences, from our region and around the world. Our passion for excellence drives our scholarly and creative programs. We pursue, produce, enrich, and distribute essential and engaging works for communities of readers. We build trust among scholars, knowledge-holders, and global audiences through our commitment to quality, intellectual freedom, and public access to knowledge. As a non-profit publisher, we flourish by collaborating with authors, faculty, libraries, museums, students, and partners. Our publications are made using sound, sustainable practices and our work helps make possible the University of Alberta’s mission to educate and inspire the human spirit.
Highlights
Cartographic Poetry
Cartographic Poetry is the first book-length, multidisciplinary study of five maps drawn in 1801 and 1802 by several Blackfoot and Gros Ventre people for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Representing some of the oldest documents created by Indigenous people on the North American prairies and foothills, these maps preserve invaluable evidence about places on the landscape, and about historic Blackfoot views of their territories. The maps were intended as navigational tools, but the landforms and locations on the maps hold significance for the Blackfoot well beyond wayfinding, and have for many centuries. Exploring their content and utility from historical, linguistic, and archaeological perspectives, Ted Binnema, François Lanoë, and Heinz W. Pyszczyk analyze the maps, their place names and features, and the tours and trips they may have supported, along with providing present-day photographs of many of the maps’ landforms.
Alice Munro and the Art of Time
Alice Munro and the Art of Time reveals how one of the world’s greatest writers of short stories challenged and reconfigured traditional assumptions about time. In chapters that analyze selected stories and collections from across Munro’s career, Laura K. Davis examines the formal and conceptual function of temporality in Munro’s oeuvre, considering the relationship between the past and the present, material experiences of being, story structure, memory, and memoir. Clear and compelling interpretations of Munro’s stories offer insights into her writing process, her representations of character and setting, and the complexities of her narrative techniques—which often evade linearity and chronology, emphasizing, instead, revision, repetition, and the body. By highlighting the connections between time and various tropes in Munro’s stories, including identity, ephemerality, and environmental change, this study provides new, exciting avenues for engaging with Munro’s work.
Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour
Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour by Kate Beaton, award-winning author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, explores connections between class, literature, and art from Cape Breton Island. She addresses the fact that people from poor or working-class backgrounds face significant barriers entering the Canadian arts scene and shows that if they do not write themselves into stories, others will, often with damaging results. Beaton thoughtfully examines personal and working-class legacies, celebrating the authenticity and power of truly seeing ourselves and each other in the art that we create.
