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Tuesdays - 10:20 am
MU 107
Article Writing Workshop
Open to 4th years and above. 3rd year students with a prior MA may enroll with advisor permission. You may enroll in this workshop more than once, and may take this workshop and the dissertation workshop concurrently.
Open to PhD students in other Humanities departments (3rd/4th year and above) in consultation with the instructor and your program's DGS.
This is one of those classes where the title tells you (almost) everything you need to know. Your goal for the semester will be the production and submission of a scholarly article to a peer-reviewed academic journal. The workshop will guide you through this process both conceptually and pragmatically. We will develop and polish student writing (building on previously written seminar or conference papers or dissertation chapters) into publishable form, select prospective journals in your field, submit your essay to one of these, and plan potential next steps. We will also think about the structures undergirding this process. What exactly is scholarly writing anyway? What is its purpose, its audience, its underlying assumptions? What makes for a good scholarly article? What distinguishes the various journals in your field and which one(s) should you target? How do editors make decisions about what goes into journals? How does peer review work? What happens after an article is accepted? And how can we approach this process as an occasion to learn more about what it is that we do as scholars, individually and collectively, as well as getting some writing done?
Readings will include selections from Eric Hayot, Elements of Academic Style; Wendy Belcher, Write Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks; and Sarah Mesle, Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now. We will also read a few published journal articles of your choosing in order to assess how they work. Our primary task, however, will be to share and review successive drafts of your article-in-progress with an eye toward revising, refining, and shaping it for publication. Students will share three or four drafts of their articles over the course of the semester, as well as polishing their introductions and abstracts, drafting responses to editorial reviews, and developing a targeted list of journals for submission. You will also read and review your peers’ work regularly.