John Dennis Moore, President and Director of Columbia University Press since 1987, has announced that he will retire on March 31, 1997. He came to the Press as an Associate Executive Editor in 1968, and was appointed Editor-in-Chief in 1974. He is chairman of the board of the University Presses of California, Columbia, and Princeton, Ltd., a corporation owned by the three presses to promote their publications in Europe. And he is a director and former chairman of the international committee of the Association of American University Presses.
Under Moore's direction, the Press added to its scholarly and reference works a trade publishing program that included books by Noam Chomsky, John Rawls and Quentin Bell. Moore also spearheaded the Press's leadership in reference publishing as Columbia became the first university press to publish a CD-ROM in 1991, The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry. The Press's centennial in 1993 was marked by publication of the Fifth Edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia.
Moore built on the Press's success in electronic publishing by introducing an electronic and new media department and by initiating a joint venture with Columbia University to provide an on-line library of the Press's reference list. New print and electronic editions of The Columbia Gazetteer of the World, The Columbia Encyclopedia, and a new electronic publication Columbia International Relations Online are all now in preparation.
Under Moore's direction, the Press published prize-winning titles in a wide range of fields, particularly in reference, Asian Studies, Literary Criticism, Gay and Lesbian Studies; European Perspectives, a series of translations that includes Antonio Gramsci, Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze; and The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800, of which six volumes have been published.
A committee to search for a new director is being appointed by Andrew H. Neilly, Jr., Chairman of the Press's Board of Trustees. Neilly will chair the search committee. Applicants may write to him at the Press, 562 West 113th Street, New York, NY 10025.
12.11.96