Humanities Program Spotlight:

Junior Faculty Benefit from Publication Workshop

One of the most pressing issues for current universities, anxious to hire and promote the very best, is the problem of the tenure book. University presses are dwindling in size and number across the country, while the requirements for tenure still hold the single-authored monograph as the primary path to success in literary, cultural, and historical fields of inquiry. So it was particularly important that the College of Humanities sponsor a Book Publication Workshop for assistant professors in the College, a workshop held in February.

The workshop was led by Bill Germano, professor of English and dean of the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Bill Germano is the author of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (Chicago, rev. ed., 2008), and has served as editor-in-chief at Columbia University Press and as vice president and publishing director at Routledge Press. At the workshop, participants were invited to define their project in exactly 100 words, to make the essential distinctions between a dissertation and a book, and to think about book projects in ways researchers generally don’t give much attention to, such as a book’s architecture, its line, and its voice. The participants ranged across eight departments and four campuses, with book prospectuses on subjects from bishops in Late Roman Antiquity and Islamic exegesis to female poisoners in nineteenth-century American literature and visual rhetoric in digital media.

Judging by the level of enthusiasm for the workshop, which filled up nearly immediately, and by the dedication of all involved during a full working day of reviews and revisions, the workshop was a success, and the junior faculty in the College are better prepared than ever to publish their research.