The Emory community raised a toast Monday to innovative scholarship, celebrating members of the faculty who published books in 2017.

The annual Feast of Words celebration filled the Jones Room in Woodruff Library, as Emory President Claire E. Sterk led a tribute to the guests of honor — the 109 faculty members who authored or edited a total of 115 books last year.

The gathering, held each year in conjunction with Emory’s Founders Week, is presented by the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence (CFDE), together with Emory Libraries and Information Technology and the Emory University Bookstore, and sponsored by the AJC-Decatur Book Festival. 

“Everybody in this room who has written a book knows what an incredible endeavor it is,” Sterk said, praising the CFDE’s work to create support structures for Emory authors, so that the often solitary experience of writing can be shared within a community of scholars. 

Before Sterk’s toast, CFDE Director Pamela Scully offered an overview of this year’s book list, which includes 69 single-author books, 22 multi-author books and 16 edited volumes. Eight titles on the list are either academic translations of works by others or translations of works by our faculty into other languages.

Of the 115 books published by Emory faculty in 2017: 

• Emory College of Arts and Sciences faculty members are represented 55 times.
• Emory School of Medicine faculty members are represented 22 times.
• Emory School of Law faculty members are represented 17 times.
• Candler School of Theology faculty members are represented 12 times.
• Oxford College faculty members are represented 9 times.
• Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Rollins School of Public Health faculty members are represented 2 times each.
• Emeriti faculty members are represented 10 times.
• 11 faculty members are represented on the list more than once, with multiple titles published in 2017. 

She also noted three books that benefitted from the CFDE’s Scholarly Writing and Publishing Fund, which provides small grants to faculty to hire an editor to help take a manuscript from one stage to the next:

• Arun Jones’s “Missionary Christianity and Local Religion: North American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836-1870”
• Dawn Peterson’s “Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion”
• Nathan Suhr-Sytsma’s “Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature.”

View the full list of Emory faculty books published in 2017.