We Got the Receipts: The Punctum Books Financial and Activity Report 2016–2019 | punctum books

Introduction: Punctum Books was founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2011, and in 2016 the press was incorporated in Santa Barbara, California as a non-profit, public benefit corporation co-directed by Eileen A. Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei. Punctum Books is a scholar-led, peer-reviewed, open-access (OA) book publisher devoted to cultivating trans-disciplinary academic work that takes risks with form and style, and to fostering authors both within and outside the Academy, including thought leaders at prestigious universities, early to mid-career researchers at a wide variety of academic institutions, precarious academics, independent scholars, artists, and others who want to push the boundaries of established disciplines and methodologies and who understand the importance of sharing their work with the Global Commons. Punctum’s catalogue, most broadly, comprises books in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts, and Architecture and Design. More particularly, Punctum is dedicated to publishing work that is not only trans-disciplinary in innovative ways (digital poetics, or imaginary materialisms, or auto-theory, for example), but which also helps to bring new fields of thought into being (such as cognitive museum studies, digital capitalism studies, Anthropocene studies, speculative musicology, soft architectures, posthumanisms, medieval disability studies, fan theory, radical pedagogics, queer literary forensics, and more). Finally, Punctum is committed to supporting projects of translation and multilingualism across a wide variety of historical periods.

A part of our commitment to our readers, donors, and funders, we intend to publish, from this year forward, an annual report detailing our activities, production, policies, and finances. This first report will cover a longer period, from our incorporation as public benefit corporation in California on May 5, 2016 until December 31, 2019.