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Ken Wissoker is the Senior Executive Editor of Duke University Press, acquiring books in anthropology, cultural studies and social theory; globalization and post-colonial theory; 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 Acquisitions 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.

Intellectual Publics provides a multi-faceted forum for cutting-edge scholarship across the humanities and social sciences as well as advice on how to best articulate and publish such work. We present the ideas and approaches that engage the most visionary thinkers of our time through talks and conversations for an audience invested in the ideas themselves.

Intellectual Publics brings together an audience that includes faculty and students from CUNY and beyond, as well as artists, writers, and scholars from outside the academy. While speakers include stellar theorists actively shaping their fields, the questions, ideas, and approaches are the main attraction.

Intellectual Publics brings that same creative focus to book publishing, a way of writing for an audience invested in the ideas and methodologies, not just the objects of study themselves.

Directed by Ken Wissoker, who is also Senior Executive Editor at Duke University Press, Intellectual Publics offers the Graduate Center and CUNY guidance for scholars — from graduate students to senior faculty — on writing and publishing their work.

Both components of Intellectual Publics assume there are thinkers, writers, and readers engaged in ideas beyond those limited to academic niches or to the larger media’s sense of what will appeal to the general public. Intellectual Publics looks to reconstitute the intellectual landscape through promoting those alternatives.