Joy de Menil

Director of Belknap Publishing

Acquisitions Editors: Janice Audet | James Brandt | Joy de Menil | Andrew Kinney | Ian Malcolm | Kathleen McDermott | Sharmila Sen | Lindsay Waters

Photo of Joy de Menil, Director of Belknap Publishing

startquoteI am eager to publish scholars at the top of their fields who wish to communicate their knowledge to a broad readership, and young and original thinkers with a strong voice on the page. I am particularly interested in history, science (particularly psychology and all things having to do with chemical pollution and the environment), women’s history and business. I work closely with my authors to structure and shape the final manuscript and guide them through every aspect of publication. I have recently published books by social psychologist Catherine Sanderson, environmental law maestro Richard Lazarus, cyber and defense expert Ben Buchanan a terrific book on fascism’s intimate impact on the personal lives of its devotees by Columbia historian Victoria de Grazia, as well as an alarmingly timely book on the cutting edge science of Healthy Buildings by a star team from Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Business School.

I spent 25 years as a trade publisher before joining Harvard University Press, working at Random House and Viking Penguin, where I published Andrew Roberts’s Churchill and Napoleon, Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets and The Templars, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity and Thomas Cromwell, 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, Mike Lofgren’s The Deep State, Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down, Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Bernard Lewis’s The Crisis of Islam, among others.endquote

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Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire, by Tom Zoellner, from Harvard University Press

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Jacket: The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, from Harvard University Press

“Predictive Policing” and Racial Profiling

While technology used in policing has improved, it hasn’t progressed, says Khalil Gibran Muhammad, if racial biases are built into those new technologies. This excerpt from his book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, shows that for the reform called for by the current protests against systemic racism and racially-biased policing to be fulfilled, the police—especially those at the top—will need to change their pre-programmed views on race and the way they see the Black citizens they are supposed to “serve and protect.” …