Keep Calm and R&R

August 6, 2019 By Carla Cevasco in Publishing, Research Tags: academic writing, Journal Articles, writing Leave a comment

It’s August, and for academics hoping to get some writing done this summer, it’s go time.

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In conversations with my writing group colleagues, who come from fields as diverse as information sciences, business, community health, and religion, we spend a lot of time discussing ways to respond to a revise and resubmit. Some of us charge right in, addressing comments the day we receive them. Some of us (in the more quantitative fields) make tables of reviewer comments and check them off one by one. Having spent years in the trenches as a writing tutor, and continuing to teach writing, I’m always fascinated by the different methods writers use to approach challenges such as interpreting and implementing reviewer feedback.

In the spirit of the many posts here at the Junto on the nuts and bolts of academic writing, I’ve written up my own process for tackling referee feedback in a revise and resubmit. It’s inspired, in part, by Wendy Laura Belcher’s brilliant Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks.

Here’s what I do when a new crop of reader reports lands in my inbox: Continue reading →

Q&A with Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore, editors of The Consequences of Loyalism

April 23, 2019 By Christopher F. Minty in Academia, Book Review, From the Archives, Historiography, Methodology, Publishing, Recent Scholarship, Research, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic History, Christopher F. Minty, Diaspora, Editing, Joseph S. Moore, Loyalism, Loyalists, Publishing, Rebecca Brannon, South Carolina Leave a comment

Following on from Emily Yankowitz’s review of The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019), we continue our Review/Q&A format with an interview with the editors, Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore. Brannon is associate professor of history at James Madison University and the author of From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), which was reviewed on The Junto in 2017. Moore is associate professor of history and department chair at Gardner-Webb University. He is the author of Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Continue reading →

Review: Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World

April 18, 2019 By Casey Schmitt in Academia, Book Review, Publishing, Recent Scholarship Tags: Anglo-Atlantic, Christian Slavery, Protestant Atlantic, race, religious history, Slavery 1 Comment

On the heels of its recent release in paperback, today The Junto features a review of Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Stay tuned tomorrow for an interview with the author, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Katharine Gerbner.

Scholarship on the Anglo-Caribbean has tended to minimize the role of the Anglican Church in Caribbean society through an emphasis on the greed and irreligiosity of the English colonists who profited from the exploitation of enslaved labor. This tendency is especially striking when compared to the historical work on Catholic institutions in neighboring French and Spanish territories. In the Anglo-Atlantic, missionary work among free and enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbean people tends to be equated with antislavery thought and activism. Katharine Gerbner’s new book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, challenges these historiographic tendencies and presents a welcome reinterpretation of the relationship between race, religion, and slavery in the Protestant Atlantic. Continue reading →

Why I’m Glad I Worked on an Edited Collection

November 6, 2018 By Rachel Herrmann in Publishing Tags: articles, book publishing, cannibalism, conferences, Edited collections, Edited volumes, Publishing, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, REF, REF2021, research excellence framework, University of Arkansas Press Leave a comment

When I was a graduate student, I wrote a master’s on cannibalism during the Starving Time of 1609-10, which became my first article. That article resulted in an invitation to edit a collection on cannibalism, which I agreed to do during a time when most early career academics were being advised to prioritize books and articles over work in edited collections (and often to avoid them entirely).

My perspective today is that I’m extremely thankful to have edited this collection, but that in the field of early American history (and I know this assessment varies from subfield to subfield), articles and monographs still seem to do better work than the edited collection in building a junior scholar’s portfolio. The other caveat I’d add is that editors need to approach their collections strategically. From the perspective of an early career academic in the UK, that strategy meant tying the collection to an attempt to win funding, using the edited collection as a way to bridge my first and second book projects, and making sure the work helped me get to know scholars whose work I respected and wanted to learn more about. Here’s how I tried to do that. Continue reading →

Q&A with L.H. Roper

October 4, 2018 By Casey Schmitt in Academia, Commentary, Interview, Methodology, Publishing, Recent Scholarship Tags: Advancing Empire, Colonialism, English Empire, imperialism Leave a comment

Today at The Junto, L.H. Roper, professor of history at the State University of New York at New Paltz and coeditor in chief of the Journal of Early American History, joins us to discuss his new book, Advancing Empire: English Interest in Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688. In the book, Roper explores the role of private interest in the establishment of a global English empire during the seventeenth century. With chapters that span America, Africa, and Asia, Roper’s work challenges us to think more critically about state versus individual initiative and emphasizes continuity across a wide geographic scope. The book came out last year and has received attention and praise in several notable reviews, which can be found here, here, and here. Continue reading →

How not to write your first book

September 7, 2017 By Rachel Herrmann in Publishing Tags: Editing, First Books, Hunger, research, Second Book Projects, writing 6 Comments

I read our roundtable on second book projects while filing away information for the future. As I made those mental files, I also found myself making a list of some of the more mechanical issues I encountered while turning my dissertation into my first book. That book isn’t done—it’s back in the press’s and readers’ hands for the moment, so I’m sure I might have some additional ideas down the line—but today I’d like to offer a preliminary list of stuff I wish I’d known. I also hope that other Juntoists will chime in with their experiences; several of us have published books now, or will very shortly do so. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the dissertation-to-book process, but I think of some of the things I’ve written before as general advice for scholars in different fields. Today I wanted to offer some more general advice, and to also delineate some thoughts that are pretty specific to historians. Continue reading →

Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Timothy Mennel on Publishing

August 24, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, academic publishing, Publishing, second book, trade publishing, University of Chicago Press, University Presses, writing Leave a comment

Continuing our roundtable “How NOT To Write Your Second Book,” Timothy Mennel, an executive editor of University of Chicago Press, looks at how the second book differs from the first.

Tell me if this sounds familiar, either for yourself or for scholars you know: “So my plan is to complete my dissertation by next May. After that, I’ll be on the market. I’ll take whatever job I can, but my focus is going to be on getting a book contract from a university press, speeding through the peer review process, and getting the leverage I need to move to an R1. And then I can start my real work. The second book is where I’ll do what I really want to. And it will be trade. I’m tired of writing just for SHEAR.”

Now, what happens, of course, is that the dissertation takes three years to finish, the job market is worse than anyone could have imagined, the peer-review process is brutal, but the book does finally come out. And no matter what else has happened—that dream of doing what you really want to, which often is framed as writing that second book as a trade book, lives on. Continue reading →

Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Paul Erickson on Fellowship Applications

August 23, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Academia, How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, Fellowships, Publishing, writing 1 Comment

Continuing our roundtable on “How NOT To Write Your Second Book,” we are pleased to have Paul Erickson, the Program Director for The Humanities, Arts, and Culture; and American Institutions, Society, and the Public Good at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, talk about Fellowship Applications.

When I was asked to participate in a roundtable on how not to write your second book, I felt like a bit of an outlier, since my CV makes it clear that the best way to not write a second book is to never have written a first book. So instead of giving advice on how to write (or how not to write) a second book, I will share some thoughts on how to ask (or how not to ask) for fellowship support to write a second book, based on 9 years I spent as Director of Academic Programs at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. I hope that these suggestions will be useful to anybody thinking about applying for fellowships, but will be directed at Junto readers who are contemplating how (and when) to apply for fellowship support for second book projects. Continue reading →

Roundtable on How NOT To Write Your Second Book: Kathleen DuVal, “Treating Your Second Book as a Job”

August 22, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features, Uncategorized Tags: academia, Publishing, second book, writing Leave a comment

We continue our roundtable on “How NOT To Write Your Second Book” with a post by Kathleen DuVal, Gray Distinguished Term Professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.

If you are reading this, you probably have a goal for yourself that in a certain number of years from now—say ten—you won’t be saying to yourself or others, “I don’t feel any closer to finishing my second book than I was ten years ago.” But you probably also don’t want to be saying, “All I have done for most of my adult life is to try to work on a book every spare minute, or feel guilty about not working on a book.”

In hopes of keeping either of those from happening, I suggest thinking of the second book as a job. I mean that in two ways. First, (if you really do want to write a second book) researching and writing it should feel like work that is part of your job, work that you have to do. But second, this book should feel like part of your job in that your job is just part of your life, alongside the other important pieces of your particular life. Continue reading →

Roundtable on “How NOT To Write Your Second Book”: Introduction by Emily Conroy-Krutz and Jessica Lepler

August 21, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Publishing, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, Publishing, second book, writing 1 Comment

This week we are privileged to feature a roundtable that was organized by Emily Conroy-Krutz and Jessica Lepler and presented at SHEAR’s 2017 conference. It was such a wonderful discuss that it deserved a broader audience. We are grateful that they all agreed to share their remarks in blog-form. Today we feature Emily and Jessica’s introduction, with individual contributions posted each day between now and the weekend.

How do you start a new book that’s on a wildly different topic from your last book? Or written in a different style? And how do you write a book while teaching new preps and serving on committees? What if you’re also raising kids and caring for aging family members? If a book could be articles, should it be articles? In a packed conference room on a hot Saturday in July, five incredibly generous, funny, and thoughtful scholars shared their tips and tricks for “How Not to Write Your Second Book,” and the laughter and nods around the room suggested that the comments, questions, and conversation spoke to concerns that are widely shared among mid-career scholars and that had sparked the creation of the SHEAR Second-Book Writers’ Workshop (2BWW). Continue reading →