‘We need to take every opportunity to make the university community aware that IU has a press to be proud of and that we are part of the academic mission of the university.’ —Janet Rabinowitch Director, IU Press Rabinowitch’s formula for keeping the IU Press’ financial picture healthy is simultaneously pragmatic and creative.

“It was the Sputnik era, and there was an interest in all things Russian,” said Rabinowitch. “After graduation, I went to Washington, D.C., where I found a job at the Library of Congress. Congress had just passed the National Defense Education Act and was offering fellowships in foreign area studies. Almost on a whim, I applied and got one to do post-graduate work in the new Russian studies program at Georgetown. In the summer of 1961, I attended a workshop with Soviet and American students at a Quaker prep school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. One of the students there was a grad student in history from IU—Alex Rabinowitch (now professor emeritus of history at IUB). Six months later, we were married, and the following year we went to the Soviet Union as exchange students.”

On Nov. 22, 1963, the Rabinowitches were living in a Moscow University dormitory. “People began knocking on our door, saying ‘Have you heard the news?’ The Russians were just devastated. They had a huge amount of sympathy for Kennedy. Later, we found out that one of the last things Kennedy did that November was arrange for the release of Frederic Barghoorn, a geography professor from Yale, who had been in the custody of Russian authorities,” said Rabinowitch.

Upon returning to the U.S., the couple launched their careers and started a family. Rabinowitch defended her dissertation while seven months pregnant with their first child, and her husband took his first teaching job at the University of Southern California. When IU offered him a position in the history department in 1967, the couple moved to Bloomington.

Rabinowitch continued to build on a relationship she had forged with IU Press while living in California. “In the year before the move, Alex and I had been editing a book together for IU Press—a collection of essays, Revolution and Politics in Russia. That was how I realized that I liked editing and working on other people’s writing,” she said.

That initial connection marked the beginning of a 29-year career at IU Press for Rabinowitch, who rose through the ranks in the classic fashion—from part-time copy editor in 1975, to sponsoring editor, to senior sponsoring editor, to editorial director, interim director and, as of July 2004, director. The late 1980s, when she joined two Association of American University Press delegations to the former Soviet Union, were a particularly exciting time.

“This was during glasnost and perestroika, and being able to make use of my academic background and my ability to speak Russian made it especially interesting and rewarding for me. As a result of the connections I made with Soviet publishers, several IU Press titles were translated into Russian and published in the U.S.S.R. in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

To date, Rabinowitch has acquired more than 500 titles, with a concentration in her areas of expertise, Russian and Eastern European studies, but also in myriad other disciplines. In recent years, she has been honored by her peers with the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies and the Distinguished Service Award of the IU Russian and East European Institute.

Rabinowitch praised her predecessors for making sound editorial decisions that have contributed to the press’ outstanding reputation in the world of scholarly publishing. “Bernard Perry, the press’ first director, had great instincts for trade-oriented publishing. He brought in the Rolfe Humphries’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it just keeps going,” she said. “Under John Gallman, the press’ list continued to grow in collaboration with strong units at the university—music, folklore, African studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies, philanthropy, etc. On his watch, we also started to expand the regional list, which has become increasingly important to us.”

As IU Press’ fourth director and the first woman to hold the position, Rabinowitch outlined her vision for the press in a State of the Press Address on July 1. Among the country’s largest public university presses, IU Press has a $7.5 million budget and 50 full-time employees. Rabinowitch’s formula for keeping the Press’ financial picture healthy is simultaneously pragmatic and creative.

“As a way into electronic publishing, I see us becoming involved in partnerships with IU units that are developing such projects and that have the funding. We also plan for more ‘front of the catalog’ books that are important and of interest to a wide swath of academic readers and that have resonance beyond the academy,” she said. “A vibrant regional list—the new Quarry Books imprint—is a wonderful vehicle for achieving this. We need to take every opportunity to make the university community aware that IU has a press to be proud of and that we are part of the academic mission of the university.”