university presses

[147hn]

Are these presses (NYU Press, Rutgers, and Temple) seen as comparable to have a contract with for the job market? Are there impressions about these university presses in terms of what they publish, or how they compare to each other?

[press]

NYU is probably the most prestigious out of those. Some of the best university presses are:

Cambridge University Press
Chicago University Press
Columbia University Press
Harvard University Press
MIT Press
Oxford University Press/Clarendon (UK/US)
Princeton University Press
Stanford University Press
University of Calfornia Press
Yale University Press
NYU Press

[prestige and presses]

For most jobs any one of those presses would be fine for tenure but if you're a junior faculty member at a top 20 department, then the prestige of the press may matter. For sociology, Yale wouldn't necessarily be a "top" press. Columbia is building their sociology list but they don't quite have the same standing as Princeton, Harvard, California, Chicago. I'd also add that University of Minnesota and Stanford are pretty good for sociology. One way, arbitrary though it may be, that a press is perceived as highly ranked is by the top awards/nominations authors receive. Minnesota has had a recent finalist on the C Wright Mills Awards list, for example.

The only other thing I'll add is that prestige matters in so far as the press has resources to market the book. I was warned against Cambridge by a colleague who published with them because of her experience with respect to marketing support.