Peter Kracht
In addition to my primary responsibilities leading and directing the University of Pittsburgh Press as a whole, I also acquire books on Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.
After studying Russia and Eastern Europe at both the undergraduate (University of Massachusetts) and graduate (Columbia University/Harriman Institute) levels, I landed my first publishing job at Oxford University Press. From there I went to Westview Press, taking the opportunity to work closely with a living legend of book publishing, Frederick Praeger. When Westview became an imprint of HarperCollins I stayed on and greatly enjoyed building a very successful list of trade books in history.
My first publishing management position came with a move to the eponymous (but no longer related) Praeger Publishers, where I was the director of a program that published over 500 books a year. This took me away from my own editorial interests for a decade, something that I came to miss greatly. To remedy this I joined the University of Pittsburgh Press, still in a managerial role but able to return to hands-on editorial work. As it happened, this move coincided with results of lots of exciting new research emerging because of the archival revolution that had unfolded across the former Soviet bloc. It was an incredible time to reenter this field, when scholars were able to access resources and write books that would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier.
I like to work with manuscripts that have the potential to shed new light on important historical events and contemporary issues, especially when they can convey their message to a wider audience—either across disciplines to other scholars, or to a wider general readership.
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