Prospective Authors - Meet Our Editorial Team

Gisela Fosado
Email: gisela.fosado@dukeupress.edu

Gisela Fosado is the Editorial Director at Duke University Press and publishes books in a wide range of areas in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, American and Atlantic World history, gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity, African American and Africana studies, environmental studies, and Latin American and Latinx Studies.  She works with authors writing scholarly books, as well as those for general readerships, and is particularly interested in books that foreground marginalized perspectives, adopt an intersectional approach, and contribute to our understanding of social movements and inequality.  

Gisela has worked with many prominent authors including Patricia Hill Collins, Renato Rosaldo, Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena, Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Enrique Dussel, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Barbara Weinstein, Gilbert M. Joseph, Laurent Dubois, Charles E. Cobb Jr., Margaret Randall, Lynn Stephen, Joanne Rappaport, and Ruth Behar.  She has also published posthumous books by Gloria Anzaldúa and C. L. R. James.

Among the series that she oversees are American Encounters/Global Interactions, Global Insecurities, Latin America in Translation, Latin America Otherwise, Narrating Native Histories, New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century, On Decoloniality, Radical Perspectives, and The C. L. R. James Archives.

Gisela holds an A.B. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan.  Before coming to Duke University Press in 2010, she served as the Associate Director for the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Assisted by
Alejandra Mejía, Editorial Associate
Email: alejandra.mejia@dukeupress.edu​

Ken Wissoker
Email: kwiss@duke.edu

Ken Wissoker is the Senior Executive Editor of Duke University Press, acquiring books in anthropology, cultural studies, and social theory; globalization and postcolonial studies; Asian, African, and American studies; music, film and television; race, gender and sexuality; science studies; and other areas in the humanities, social sciences, media, and the arts. He joined the Press as an Acquisition Editor in 1991; became Editor-in-Chief in 1997; and was named Editorial Director in 2005. In addition to his duties at the Press, he serves as Director of Intellectual Publics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in New York City.

Ken has published over a thousand books that have won over 150 prizes. Among the authors whose books he has published are Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Achille Mbembe, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Charles Taylor, José David Saldivar, Lisa Lowe, Lauren Berlant, Brian Massumi, Arjun Appadurai, Sara Ahmed, Fred Moten, Chandra Mohanty, Greg Tate and Cherríe Moraga. In addition he has published the work of artists including Randy Weston, Horace Tapscott, Fred Wesley, and Renée Green.

In addition to the work of these leading scholars, he is particularly proud of the number of pioneering first books he acquired. When asked what he looks for, Ken says, “I love seeing a project that changes my thinking, that is more than a recognizable approach well-applied.”

He has written on publishing for The Chronicle of Higher Education and in Cinema Journal, and writes a column for the Japanese cultural studies journal “5.” A three-part interview with him by Adeline Koh appeared in April 2013 on the Prof. Hacker blog. He speaks regularly on publishing at universities in the US and around the world.

Assisted by
Joshua Tranen, Editorial Associate
Email: joshua.tranen@dukeupress.edu
Ryan Kendall, PhD, Editorial Associate
Email: ryan.kendall@dukeupress.edu

Courtney Berger
Email: cberger@dukeupress.edu

Courtney Berger is Executive Editor at Duke University Press. She joined the Press in 2003, after receiving her Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins University. Courtney acquires books across the humanities and social sciences. Her key areas of acquisition include: social and political theory, transnational American studies, Native American and indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, critical ethnic studies, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, media studies, literary studies, and geography.

Courtney seeks out books that are theoretically and politically engaged and that speak to a wide, interdisciplinary audience. She has published books by many prominent scholars, but she also enjoys collaborating with first-time authors who are in the process of establishing their critical voice.  Some of the authors she has worked with include: Jane Bennett, Audra Simpson, Michelle Murphy, Mel Chen, Pheng Cheah, Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson, Kristen Ghodsee, Jennifer Terry, Elizabeth Grosz, Afsaneh Najmabadi, William Connolly, Kathi Weeks, Eugenie Brinkema, Michelle Stephens, E. Patrick Johnson, Nicole Starosielski, Simone Browne, Bianca Williams, Elizabeth Wilson, Stephen Best, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Iyko Day, and Mark Rifkin.

In addition to her editorial work, Courtney leads Duke University Press’s participation in the Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowship program, a collaborative three-year grant that provides apprenticeships in acquisitions departments. She is also on the advisory panel of the Scholarly Communication Institute and is a founding member of the Publishing Makerspace project, a team dedicated to developing new ways for librarians, scholars, publishers, and technologists to collaborate on producing and disseminating multi-model scholarship.

Assisted by
Sandra Korn, Assistant Editor
Email: sandra.korn@dukeupress.edu

Elizabeth Ault
Email: elizabeth.ault@dukeupress.edu

Elizabeth Ault is an Editor at Duke University Press, acquiring books in African Studies, Urban Studies, Middle East Studies, Geography, Theory from the South, Black and Latinx studies, disability studies, trans studies, and critical prison studies. She is responsible for the Theory in Forms series, coedited by Nancy Rose Hunt and Achille Mbembe, and works with the Camera Obscura collective on their book series. Elizabeth is most interested in projects that reach outward across disciplines and academic conversations in surprising ways, that connect historical and emerging conditions, and that are committed to engaging with race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability.

Prior to joining Duke Press in 2012, Elizabeth received an A.B. (with honors) in American Studies from Brown University and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. She has published her research in Television & New Media, among other places. While in graduate school, Elizabeth worked at the Minnesota Historical Society Press, where she helped to write the catalog for The 1968 Exhibit. In addition to her editorial work, Elizabeth is an active participant in Durham community organizations like Southerners on New Ground and the Durham Prison Books Collective.

Assisted by
Ben Kossak, PhD, Editorial Associate
Email: benjamin.kossak@dukeupress.edu

Miriam Angress
Email: miriam.angress@dukeupress.edu

Miriam Angress is an Associate Editor at Duke University Press, which she joined in 1995 as assistant to the Editor-in-Chief.  She primarily acquires books in religion, world history, women's studies, and creative non-fiction.  She supervises the World and Latin America Reader series (edited by Orin Starn and Robin Kirk), the Design Principles for Teaching History series (edited by Antoinette Burton), and The Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People series (edited by Jacob K. Olupona, Dianne M. Stewart, and Terrence L. Johnson). Recently, many of her acquisitions have combined religion and affect theory, religion and anthropology, or religion and women's studies.

Miriam also writes plays and fiction; she won a 2007 North Carolina Arts Council grant for playwriting and has had several plays produced in Chicago, Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill.