Berg Publishers

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Berg Publishers is an academic publishing company based in Oxford, England that was started in 1983.^[1] Berg publishes monographs, textbooks and reference works as well as journals. Concentrations are fashion, design, anthropology, history and cultural studies.^[2] Berg is known as the publisher of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, edited by Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. This journal pioneered the concept of fashion theory to bring the study of dress and fashion into the academic arena.

In 2002, managing director Kathryn Earle and director Sara Everett led a group of private investors in a management buyout of the company. Having managed the company since 1997, they had doubled sales since then to 750,000 pounds. In 2002 Berg published 50 new titles per year and had 400 in print. Its growth had been led by expansion into the US market, then using New York University Press as its distributor. ^[3]

Book Industry Communication (BIC), a trade standards group for electronic commerce and supply chain effiiciency, awarded Berg its BIC Product Data Excellence Gold Award in 2007-2008^[4], and its e4books project accredited Berg in 2008.^[5]

Berg won the Independent Publishers Guild's 2008 Publishing Technology E-Publishing Award for its collection of profitable digital strategies in March 2008. The judges "liked the way it had taken apart its books to adapt them to digital environments."^[6]

As of March 2008, Berg published thirteen journals^[7], with several more planned to start in 2009. Berg currently has in development The Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress & Fashion, a reference work that will publish in print and online in 2010. Berg is distributed in the United States by Palgrave Macmillan.