How Grad Students and Junior Professors

Can Publish, Not Perish

Here at Vitae, we go to a lot of academic conferencesand attend a lot of lectures, workshops, and
other sessionsso you dont have to. The Conferencegoer takes a periodic look at some of the helpful,
unexpected, or otherwise interesting talks we sit in on.
The conference: The annual meeting of the American Studies Association
The location: Washington, D.C.
The scene: As the seat of democracy and finance, the nations capital served as the ideal setting for this
years ASA conference, whose theme was Beyond the Logic of Debt, Toward an Ethics of Collective
Dissent. The four-day meeting included sessions on banking and credit, theft of indigenous lands,
home foreclosure, environmental devastation, health care inequities, and mass incarcerationalong
with a few workshops and roundtables offering research and teaching tips to grad students and junior
faculty.
The session: Your First Time: Article Publishing and Professionalization for the Uninitiated
The speakers: Sarah Banet-Weiser, a professor in the school of communication at the University of
Southern California at Annenberg and editor of the American Quarterly; Joanne Meyerowitz, a history
and American studies professor at Yale University and former editor of the Journal of American
History; Michelle Mitchell, an associate professor of history at New York University and former North
American editor of Gender & History; and Tavia Nyongo, an associate professor of performance

studies at New York University and co-editor of Social Text.

The takeaway: Getting published is hardespecially for graduate students and young professors
trying to do it for the first time, without a full understanding of the rapidly changing publishing
environment.
The fierce competition for academic jobs has put more pressure on graduate students to publish early
and often. Hiring institutions are increasingly likely to expect newly-minted Ph.D.s to have a book
under contract, or to have published some scholarly articles, at the very least. And, like it or not, the
book-length monograph remains the gold standard for tenure and promotion.
Because of that intense competition, junior scholars face a growing number of hurdles on the road to
getting published. Scholarly journals and presses are seeing an increase in manuscript and monograph
submissions, but theyre having a hard time making more space for the articles or selling the books.
Add to this that new technologies are changing the way scholarship is being shared. A new generation
of scholars is pushing to revolutionize the traditional dissertation by bringing it into a more interactive,
digital format. The rise of electronic journals and institutional repositories has allowed scholars to post
their work more quickly, but it has also spurred debate about research quality, facilitated the sale of
dissertations by third parties, and muddied the hiring and tenure picture.
So its no wonder young academics have plenty of unanswered questions about publication. This
special panel pulled together current and former editors from some of the most influential journals in
American studies to debate a number of those topics: When should you start publishing review articles?
Should you ever publish in a non-refereed forum? Should you craft seminar papers so that they lend
themselves to publication in a particular journal? (And how would you even go about doing that?)
In other words, there was a lot to chew on. But here were a few of the most useful tips on offer:
Be ready to revise.
The typical advice that graduate students get from their faculty mentors: Write a good dissertation and
immediately get it published, so you can get a job. So students toil away for five years or more, get
feedback from their committee members, defend the thing, and then think its ready for prime time.
But graduate students should remember that the primary function of their dissertation is to get the Ph.D.
The document might demonstrate their ability to do sustained research, but that doesnt mean it will
appeal to book editors who are primarily concerned with maximizing their profits. Editors wont want
to wade through a whole bunch of narrow arguments. They will want you to extract much of your
wonkiest material and put it into footnotes (or leave it out altogether). Theyll also want you to work
with primary source materials to flesh out your chaptersand to tinker with your tone and style to
appeal to a broader audience.
So dont think that the approval of a small committee of professors in your department means youre
ready for a contract, a book cover, and a price tag.
Dont give away all your goods.

How much of your work should you share? And where should you publish it? It might seem like any
publication offer is worth taking, but Michelle Mitchell advised the audience to exercise caution. Be
incredibly selective, she said. There is some concern among editors about publishing your work if it
appears on JSTOR or Project MUSE.
Editors are generally interested in publishing original research only. This means that, when youre
writing your dissertation, you may want to hold back on some of your strongest material. As for that
strongest material thing: Mitchell urged graduate students not to try to spin conference or seminar
papers into journal articles. It may take a lot of time to refine your argument and articulate it in a way
that registers to readers outside your field.
Respect the readers reports.
As an editor at NYU, Sara Banet-Weiser reviews around 250 journal article submissions a year. But
shes also had plenty of experience being the one who gets rejected. When she was a graduate student,
she sent her dissertation to two university presses. One sent her a nice readers report; the other, a harsh
one that made her stomach drop.
All my insecurities came crashing down, she said. Keen to make her work better, though, BanetWeiser eventually overcame the initial hurt and used the harsh report as a template for revising her
dissertation into a book.
Readers reports are usually frank, sometimes cranky. But most contain strong constructive criticism
about the manuscripts flaws even if theyre painful to read.
If you get a negative report, put it away, Banet-Weiser said. Let yourself get over it. Be sure to write
a careful response and respect the labor that went into the report, because people are committed to the
field and they want good work out there.
Choose the right publication.
What scholars publish isnt the only thing that matters, Joanne Meyerowitz stressed. Where they
publish is just as importantand it can make a difference in a bid for tenure. Each journal is different,
and so is each press.
Ive spent a lot of time rejecting manuscripts, but Ive also spent a lot of time suggesting other places
where scholars can submit their work for a better fit, she said.
Meyerowitz urged the audience to read articles in the journals they are considering submitting to, and
to think long and hard about how their work can fit into the conversation.
Be patient and professional. Given the length of time that it takes for your work to be reviewed by the
numerous players involved, you have little choice but to be patient. Its not a good idea to keep bugging
editors about their submission.
And its also not a good idea to not be too casual in their correspondences with editors. When
communicating with an editor by email, be sure to use clear, direct subject lines, appropriate email
addresses (not msdivaphd@hotmail.com or bigdaddyanthropologist@gmail.com) that you would use in

the workplace.
Follow Stacey Patton on Twitter at @SPchronvitae.

Stacey Patton is a former reporter at Vitae. Currently, she is an assistant professor of multimedia
journalism at Morgan State University.
Follow her on Twitter at @DrStaceyPatton.
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