As I mentioned before on the blog, I’m the East Asia area editor for a series now underway at Yale University Press called World Thought in Translation. We would very much like to solicit inquiries and proposals for inclusion in the series. 

Here is a brief description of the overall series:

Our series “World Thought in Translation,” supported by a major grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will make important works of political, legal, social and ethical thought available in English translation. Its focus will be on previously untranslated texts from outside European traditions, particularly the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, South Asia, China, East Asia, and Africa, but the series will also be open to important but under-studied works originally written in European languages, particularly from Russia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The series will embrace both pre-modern and modern classics. Our primary criteria are the enduring influence of the texts for political and social debate and their unavailability to a wide English-speaking audience. We thus intend to fill the most urgent gaps faced by faculty seeking to teach courses on the political thought of non-Western societies. Given that the works in question will be unfamiliar to students, the translations will be accompanied by interpretive and analytic essays to give readers a basic introduction to the texts’ backgrounds, the circumstances in which they were written, and their subsequent influence within and outside their cultures.

These books are intended to be useful to faculty and students not only in philosophy and political science departments but also in such fields as anthropology, history, religious studies, area studies and law. Some of the works are expected to reach a sizeable popular audience beyond the university.

I would appreciate hearing from anyone with a potential project in mind. I can also help direct any projects that are not in the East Asia area to the appropriate editor. Note that one possibility might be to revise and/or supplement existing translations that are now out of print and thus difficult to obtain.