The Cultural Frames, Framing Culture series happily celebrates its twenty-fifth year of publication with the University of Virginia Press. Begun in 2000, the series has covered a wide range of cultural issues from historical, literary, philosophical, and communications perspectives. Focused on how culture frames our narratives and, conversely, how our narratives produce the culture that frames them, the series has attempted to bridge the gap between previously disparate disciplines while insisting on bringing practical applications to bear on theoretical conceptions.

The series was launched with three books. The Golden Avant-Garde by Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello is a collaboration between a philosopher and an artist that examines both the complicity and the defiance of twentieth-century avant-garde art movements confronted with prevailing forces of government, technology, and commerce. Nancy West’s Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia delves into how Kodak marketing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries instructed amateur photographers through the lens of nostalgia to convey their lives in ways that erased unwanted memories. Finally, Margot Norris’s Writing War in the Twentieth Century explores the dialogue between two seemingly incommensurable hallmarks of the twentieth century: modern mass warfare and innovative art. All three books established foundational directions for the series in probing the complex interactions between culture and the art forms that both shape it and are shaped by it.

With another thirty plus books now in print, Cultural Frames, Framing Culture has embraced a wide variety of subjects—media studies, climate change, travel, athletics, fashion, masculinity, post-feminism, otherness, race, quantum physics, film and documentary studies, institutions, and nonhuman intelligence, among others. Associate Editor Justin Neuman and I have focused on books that appeal to specialists and general readers alike, all written in accessible prose. From Josh Toth’s analysis of the stranger in American fiction, film, television, and music in Stranger America to Andrew Kalaidjian’s consideration of media responses to ecological crises in Spectacle Earth; from Stephanie Hawkins’s cultural history of National Geographic magazine in American Iconographic to Cristina Rodriguez’s investigation of the literature of the barrios in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami in Walk the Barrio; from Robin Blaetz’s inquiry into two hundred years of representations of Joan of Arc in American culture in Visions of the Maid to Len Gutkin’s scrutiny of the complicated forms of masculinity evinced by the figure of the “dandy” in Dandyism—the series returns to and extends Raymond Williams’s conception of culture as implicit and explicit in everyday experience, not only in high art.

As America approaches its 250th year, we have witnessed burgeoning attempts to whitewash or erase history and to redefine culture from a singular ideological viewpoint. It remains a core belief of the editors of Cultural Frames, Framing Culture that exploring nuanced perspectives in pursuit of truthful and transformative revelations is essential to good scholarship and intellectual practice. How, what, and why we read, write, view, and interpret are fertile avenues of study, intimately linked to discovering who we are, have been, and may become. Creative and effective inquiry is premised on interrogating preconceptions and on bridging disparate ideas and points of view. Such inquiry is the means by which we refresh, renew, and grow, both individually and collectively.

—Robert Newman, Series Editor and Past President and Director of the National Humanities Center