Joy de Menil

I am eager to publish scholars at the top of their fields who want to communicate their knowledge to a broad readership, and young and original thinkers with a strong voice on the page. I look for books with ideas that matter. I am particularly interested in history, science, and politics (especially women’s history, narrative and intellectual history, psychology, and books having to do with environmental issues). I work closely with my authors to structure and shape the final manuscript and guide them through every aspect of publication, with an eye towards securing maximal coverage. I have recently published a study of bystanders and moral rebels by social psychologist Catherine Sanderson, a gripping narrative history of the most important environmental case ever to make it to the Supreme Court by Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, a terrific look at fascism’s conflation of the personal and political by Columbia historian Victoria de Grazia, a groundbreaking reconsideration of Renaissance political thought by Harvard intellectual historian James Hankins, an alarmingly timely book on the cutting-edge science of Healthy Buildings by Joseph Allen from Harvard School of Public Health and John Macomber from the Harvard Business School, and two important histories of race in America, Traveling Black by Mia Bay and Justice Rising by Patricia Sullivan.

I spent twenty-five years as a trade publisher before joining Harvard University Press, working at Random House and Viking, where I published Andrew Roberts’s Churchill and Napoleon; Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets, The Wars of the Roses, Magna Carta, and The Templars; Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity; Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects; Sonia Purnell’s Clementine; William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s The Self-Driven Child; Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down; Alec Ryrie’s Protestants; Mike Lofgren’s The Party Is Over and The Deep State; Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919; Richard Holbrooke’s To End a War; Ann Wroe’s Pontius Pilate; Bernard Lewis’s The Crisis of Islam; Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues; and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, among others.

Recent Books

Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White
Patricia Sullivan

Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
Mia Bay

Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote
Susan Ware

Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire
Tom Zoellner

The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court
Richard J. Lazarus

Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity
Joseph G. Allen and John D. Macomber

Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels
Catherine A. Sanderson

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do
Erik J. Larson

Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy
James Hankins

De Gaulle
Julian Jackson

The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy
Victoria de Grazia

Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt
Alec Ryrie