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 →

Flashing Before My Eyes

January 10, 2019 By Joseph M. Adelman in Research Tags: books, Editing, writing 9 Comments

Some of the chapter drafts I’ve found in my office.

As I spent the final months of 2018 completing the copy editing and page proof process for my book, I found myself surprised at how easy it was to say goodbye to the book. Before last summer, I assumed I would find myself despondent at the thought of never being able to work on it again, that I would worry about finding typos or other errors, that I wouldn’t be able to make final decisions on anything. But other than the stress of actually going through the manuscript in a short period of time, I’ve instead felt excitement to check items off the final to-do list.

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Guest Post: Elizabeth Seton and Me: Or, How I Almost Wrote a Book about a Saint Without Mentioning God

September 7, 2018 By Rachel Herrmann in Guest Posts Tags: Amanda Porterfield, biography, books, Catherine Brekus, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Christopher Grasso, Cornell University Press, Editing, Elizabeth Seton, Emmitsburg, Eric Schlereth, Faith, George Marsden, God, Lincoln Mullen, Maryland, Mozart, Prayer, religion, Sainthood, Saints, Sisters and Daughters, women, writing 1 Comment

Today’s guest post is authored by Catherine O’Donnell. Her book, Elizabeth Seton: American Saint was published this month by Cornell University Press. She is also the author of Men of Letters in the Early Republic (UNC Press, 2008) and is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University.

When I arrived at the archive in Emmitsburg, Maryland, my heart sank. My subject was Elizabeth Seton, woman of the early American republic and saint in the Roman Catholic Church, and the archives to which I’d traveled are held on the grounds of her shrine. In order to be at the archives first thing Monday, I’d arrived on a Sunday and decided to see what was happening nearby. The building adjacent to the archives is a minor basilica, so what was happening was Mass. When a guide asked whether I’d visited the Altar of Relics, I winced. I felt oddly guilty about bring my historian’s purposes and questions into this reverent world. I also knew that biographers pride themselves on not writing hagiographies, and that many academic historians pride themselves on not being biographers at all. I felt I was blaspheming both a faith and a profession. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Writing Alongside Your Students

July 19, 2018 By The Junto Moderator in Pedagogy Tags: Mairin Odle, Native Americans, pedagogy, peer review, Pop culture, teaching, The Revenant, writing 1 Comment

Return guest poster Mairin Odle is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama. She is currently writing a book, Skin Deep: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America.

A few years ago, I was designing a new course, one that would fulfill a writing distribution requirement at my university. I knew I wanted to find ways to engage the class with the creative aspects of writing, not just the mechanics; I wanted to show my students how ideas develop, how revisions matter, and how classrooms could be collaborative spaces where we collectively care about our work rather than churn out assignments. So on the first day of class, I promised them (perhaps rashly) that I would write a final essay alongside them. Continue reading →

Wonder and Historical Knowledge: Reflections from the Omohundro Institute Annual Conference

June 28, 2018 By The Junto Moderator in Conferences Tags: American Revolution, historiography, Jamestown, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, writing 3 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Lindsay Chervinsky, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in January 2017 and her book, The President’s Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, will be published by Harvard University Press in fall 2019.

View of the sunset from Jamestown, June 16, 2018

Over the weekend of June 14-17, historians of Early America gathered in Williamsburg, Virginia to attend the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture’s annual conference and to celebrate the OI’s 75th anniversary. While I always come away from this conference feeling inspired, this year I returned home thinking about audience, historical knowledge, and wonder.

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Inspiration Roundtable: Haunting Sources

November 29, 2017 By Casey Schmitt in Inspiration in Research, Recent Scholarship, Research, Roundtables Tags: African Princes, books, British Empire, Inspiration in Research, Opinion, Slavery, writing 1 Comment

Today, Lindsay O’Neill, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California, joins our weeklong discussion about sources and inspiration. Her first book, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015. Today she shares the sources that inspired (or haunted) her book-in-progress, titled “Barbarous Country: The Delogaon Princes and the British Empire, 1715-1725.”

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I do not remember precisely when the princes began to haunt me. It might have been when I called up the ominous sounding “Book of Strangers” at the Huntington Library. This turned out to simply be a list of dinner guests at the Duke of Chandos’ estate of Cannons, but what I found inside was rather extraordinary. Listed at the Duke’s table on 24 September 1721 were “Two African Princes.” Intriguing, I thought. However, this must not have been the first time I came across a reference to them, for I remember knowing who these men were. I had, or would, read about them in letters from the Duke of Chandos who hosted the dinner. I would encounter them again in the letters of Sir John Perceval. And then again in the letters of Sir Hans Sloane. I told you these two men were haunting me. Now, there was no reason for them to. At the time, I was not interested in African princes. I was interested in letters since I was working on what would become my first book: The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World. But it turned out that the loosely linked letter writers whose correspondence I was working my way through were interested in African princes and soon so was I. Continue reading →

Should You Write your Dissertation as a Book?

October 30, 2017 By Tom Cutterham in Academia, Methodology Tags: academic publishing, academic writing, Dissertation, Method, writing 4 Comments

Impostor syndrome comes in many forms in academia, and this is how it comes for me: I shouldn’t be a doctor, because I never wrote a dissertation. I just wrote a book. It’s not that I regret the choice. But since that book came out, I’ve had the chance to think about what can be gained, and what lost, by writing your dissertation as a book. This is not a pro-con list. It is a pro-pro list. The hitch is, you can only pick one. 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: Tamara Thornton on Choosing New Topics

August 25, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in How NOT To Write Your Second Book, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: academia, academic publishing, Publishing, writing 2 Comments

We are pleased to have yet another excellent contribution to our “How NOT To Write Your Second Book” Roundtable. Tamara Plakins Thornton is professor of history at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and the author of Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860 (1989), Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (1996), and Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life (2016).

And Now for Something Completely Different

Remember this old chestnut? “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.” It applies to historians too, and you’ll probably find out which one you are when you turn to your second book project. Building on your first book, making a new contribution to that historiographical conversation? Hedgehog. Or are you drawn to a topic pretty much unrelated to your earlier work? Fox. Make no mistake. Neither is smarter, more original or creative, or produces more important scholarship. But their experiences do differ. Let me share a fox’s perspective on the risks and rewards to your scholarship, intellectual development, and professional standing if you follow your nose into brand-new territory.

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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 →