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| William P. Sisler | |
William P. Sisler, the director of Harvard University Press for nearly 27 years, is retiring at the end of this academic year.
During Sisler's tenure, the press has published books by winners of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award and scholars including Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Amartya Sen, Catharine MacKinnon, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Bruno Latour, Mary Beard and Thomas McCraw. He also oversaw the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, a historical analysis of the dynamics driving the distribution of wealth in Europe and the U.S. that became a bestseller and has sold more copies than any book in the press's history.
Sisler guided the expansion of the press in Europe, establishing an independent U.K. office. The press and its partners also launched the digital Loeb Classical Library, the open-access electronic Emily Dickinson Archive, the electronic Dictionary of American Regional English and the Murty Classical Library of India.
Sisler received a Ph.D. in classics from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 and a master's degree in administrative science, also from Johns Hopkins, in 1983. After working as a senior acquisitions editor for Johns Hopkins University Press, he served as executive editor and v-p at Oxford University Press before coming to Harvard University Press in 1990.