About Us
Faenum Publishing is an independent, open-access publisher, focusing on Classical texts and commentaries. We are interested in creating and disseminating work that for various reasons falls outside the purview of traditional academic publishing. While no author or text is out of bounds, we look for works that fall outside the traditional canon of study, aiming to make a broad selection of premodern literature available to a wider and more diverse audience.
We seek to inhabit a space somewhere between old and new media, between the structured world of the university press and wild, digital expanse of the internet. Our goal is to be at home with both but restricted to neither. While the prices of textbooks continue to rise, we use new technology to make our texts available at low cost or no cost to you, our readers. In exchange, we ask for one thing: your feedback. Unlike traditional publishers, whose products receive intensive editing and peer-review (and a price tag to match), we rely heavily on the input of our readers to insure the quality of our texts. We update all digital editions regularly, and the print-on-demand process allows us to make revisions as often as errors are found. So if you have a comment, let’s hear it! Have an idea for a text? Even better! Faenum is a place for active students, not passive consumers. Here students of all levels (the amateur, the seasoned scholar, the undergraduate, the autodidact) can come together to read, to write, to teach, to learn, but ultimately to contribute.
We seek to inhabit a space somewhere between old and new media, between the structured world of the university press and wild, digital expanse of the internet. Our goal is to be at home with both but restricted to neither. While the prices of textbooks continue to rise, we use new technology to make our texts available at low cost or no cost to you, our readers. In exchange, we ask for one thing: your feedback. Unlike traditional publishers, whose products receive intensive editing and peer-review (and a price tag to match), we rely heavily on the input of our readers to insure the quality of our texts. We update all digital editions regularly, and the print-on-demand process allows us to make revisions as often as errors are found. So if you have a comment, let’s hear it! Have an idea for a text? Even better! Faenum is a place for active students, not passive consumers. Here students of all levels (the amateur, the seasoned scholar, the undergraduate, the autodidact) can come together to read, to write, to teach, to learn, but ultimately to contribute.
Who We Are
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Stephen Nimis is an Emeritus Professor of Classics at Miami University and Professor and Chair of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo.
In teaching Greek and Latin for over thirty years, I frequently struggled to find appropriate materials for students who have had a survey of grammar that included some reading and who are now ready to begin reading continuous texts in Greek or Latin. The single greatest obstacle for such students is vocabulary, followed closely by the great range of forms and idiosyncrasies found in every text depending on era, genre and subject matter. Available materials always seemed to take for granted that students would proceed "inch by inch," studying small selections of text rather than reading continuously. Detailed literary commentary aimed at professional classicists was more readily available than basic grammatical and lexical support aimed at students just beginning to read seriously for the first time. On-line technologies like Perseus and the POD distribution process have now simplified the logistics of producing pedagogical materials and also made the process more dialectic: we invite readers' suggestions and do our best to implement them as soon as possible. Legamus! |
E-mail: [email protected]
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E-mail: [email protected]
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Evan Hayes is a 2011 graduate of Miami University with majors in Classics and Philosophy and a minor in Medieval Studies. He was the recipient of the 2011 Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Prize. His research interests include philosophy of language, ancient science, digital humanities and natural language processing.
To me, Faenum is about openness. It’s about trying something new and putting it out there, seeing who can use it and who can improve it, and allowing them to do that. I take my cue here from the idea of open source software engineering. Eric Raymond (The Cathedral and the Bazaar) said that “treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.” Every time someone picks up one of these books, they’re not just getting a text to read, they’re getting an invitation to a conversation about how that text ought to be read. Do you have to participate? No. But I hope you’d want to, because you might learn something beyond what you read on the page. And your contribution might help someone, somewhere, who reads this tomorrow, or next week, or next year. The possibility is pretty powerful. |