About us

During our long history dating back to the original University of London Press in 1910, the Press has published under a variety of names and imprints including Athlone Press (1949-79, now owned by Bloomsbury Publishing) which published notable contemporary thinkers. In recent years, the Press focused on supported the publishing strategies of the internationally renowned humanities institutes based within the School of Advanced Study (SAS) at the University of London.  

Building on our heritage, we are now embarking on a new publishing strategy which marks a continued evolution for the Press in ‘opening up humanities research’. Having reacquired the University of London Press brand in 2019, we are now expanding our publishing programme to play a key role in supporting the School’s mission and offering a new approach and vision for humanities publishing.

As outlined in our Funding and governance section, we are an integral part of SAS, which receives special funding from Research England to promote and facilitate humanities research.

Unlike traditional university presses, our funding through SAS means that we have a unique remit in service to the arts and humanities more broadly. We support the work of SAS and its strategy across several key areas relating to publishing and impact, through:   

• our publishing programme, with books which open up new research agendas and methodological approaches, explore the future of humanities disciplines and highlight the value of humanities research in tackling contemporary challenges;  
• new publications which offer experimental new models of open access publishing, ensuring humanities disciplines can realise the benefits and opportunities which open access publishing can offer; 
• representing the unique needs and perspectives of humanities disciplines and researchers in wider discussions about the future of academic publishing and open research;  
• our collaborative publishing relationships with learned societies and partners within the HE, cultural and publishing sectors;  
• our carefully developed series of publishing-related training sessions aimed at helping humanities researchers of all career stages navigate a changing publishing landscape;  
• using the Press as a vehicle in sector discussions about the challenges and opportunities relating to open research and new publishing and funding models.  

Our funding through SAS enables us to publish between 20–25 books each year. This includes open access books without author charges in a number of our book series (see our Open access policy for more information). Our publishing programme is also supported by income from print sales of our books and institutional funding, including pilot funding schemes (see Funding and governance for more detail on this).  

An important part of our work in supporting SAS and its wider strategy is our contribution to its research training programme, particularly with helping arts and humanities researchers navigate an increasingly complex and fast-changing publishing landscape. As part of this, we publish detailed guidance and run a new series of publishing-related training workshops on key topics such as open access, peer review and book and journal publishing. We also work with external partners to extend the reach and impact of this training. For more details, please visit our Training hub. 

Our unique funding situation also means we have a responsibility to offer new publishing models and a space for experimentation for open access humanities publishing. We will be focusing on this over the next few years, developing innovative new enhanced open access books and trialling new funding models which we hope others will be able to learn from and build upon. Please see Projects and initiatives for more information about some of the funding models we’re currently involved with.  

We aim to ‘open up humanities research’ in support of SAS’s national mission – not just through publishing the majority of our new books as open access, but also in terms of the innovative types of publication we will produce, the diverse and global audiences we aim to reach, and the publishing collaborations we develop with both academic and non-academic partners.

We publish across humanities disciplines, including History, Literature, Languages and Cultures, Classical Studies, Law and Art History (amongst others), and will be expanding our publishing programme into areas such as Digital Humanities. We publish monographs, edited collections and short-form books (20–50,000 words) and are developing new book series in areas which will push the humanities in new directions. 

The majority of our new books are published open access, enabling more people than ever before to access high-quality research, regardless of income and geography. We are proud that our free online titles have now been read by over a million people worldwide in more than 200 countries and territories globally. We also offer print editions of our books for sale, including hardback and paperback formats alongside open access editions, and all our books (including open access titles) go through a rigorous peer review process to ensure they are high-quality. Where necessary, we also publish non-open access titles (for example, projects which include a significant amount of third-party material).  

We offer authors a friendly, supportive and professional publishing experience, and you can read testimonials from some of our published authors. If you have a proposal which you think might fit with our programme, please contact us.

We are distributed in the UK and rest of world by Ingram Publisher Services, and in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. Click here for more information about our distributors, including contact information. 

We are also open to working with learned societies and organisations in the humanities on new journal opportunities. If you would like to discuss a potential journal with us, please get in touch.  

Our books have received a range of scholarly and broader review coverage, including publications such as the London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Conversation, and  The Times, amongst many others.

Freedom Seekers by Simon P. Newman won the inaugural 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prize & Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award in the History category. These new awards were created by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and Arcadia to generate enthusiasm and prestige for open access books among humanistic scholars.

Becoming a Historian by Penelope J. Corfield and Tim Hitchcock won the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles, 2024 Award.

We have also had several titles shortlisted for prestigious awards, including Coal Country by Ewan Gibbs shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards 2021 and two shortlisted titles for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize (Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour by Sarah Goldsmith and Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England by Sarah Fox).  

Collaboration is at the heart of what we do, from the creative and supportive relationships we build with our authors and publishing partners to our work with other university presses and sector organisations through initiatives like EvenUp  and the new Open Institutional Publishing Association which we helped to develop.  

We are involved in a range of publishing collaborations and new projects with partners across publishing and the HE sector, including open access pilot projects. For more information about these, please see our Projects and initiatives page.  

We are a member of the following organisations: