Scholarly Communication

Dr. Joyce Kinkead, Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University discusses her recent book, A Writing Studies Primer (Broadview Press. 2022). A Carnegie Foundation/CASE US Professor of the Year, Professor Kinkead’s primary scholarly areas are in Writing Studies and Undergraduate Research. She has brought a tremendous amount of her expertise in undergraduate research, writing, and composition to the forefront of A Writing Studies Primer.Writing is omnipresent in our lives, yet we rarely stop and consider its history and material culture. This volume introduces student readers to the development of writing across time and societies. The book incorporates autoethnography and asks readers to consider writing histories, influences, processes, and tools in their own lives. Designed for composition courses with a Writing about Writing focus or courses in writing studies, A Writing Studies Primer is a unique introduction to writing through its material culture.Dr. Julia M. Gossard is Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at Utah State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alessandra Anzani, Editorial Director, Academic Studies Press, talks about the steps that authors need to take to bring their manuscripts to publication. The conversation includes a deep dive into the different kinds of editing a book goes through, including what authors need to do themselves or with external support vs. the editing (some) publishers will do for authors. We also discuss some of the advantages of small publishers and how to best promote your book after it is published.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Cormac Herley, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. We talk about the science of security and as well, about the communication of security science.Cormac Herley : "For very many projects, all through, I sort of have this kind of imaginary dialogue going on with my imagined audience or with representatives of my imagined audience, where what I'm doing on my side of the talk is to convince them. And for me personally, the point of the dialogue is kind of, What am I trying to convince them of? Because, I mean, if I can't tell myself first what it is I'm trying to convince them of, well then, success is going to be very unlikely." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Blunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Cultural Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums, and Patriotic Practices (Beacon Press, 2022) provides a field guide to the memorials, museums, and practices that commemorate white supremacy in the United States—and how to reimagine a more deeply shared cultural infrastructure for the future.Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps readers identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell us vital stories about who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs.Examining landmark moments such as the erection of the first American museum and Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling pledge of allegiance, historian Kristin Hass explores the complicated histories of sites of cultural infrastructure. With sharp analysis and a broad lens, Hass makes the undeniable case that understanding what cultural infrastructure is, and the deep and broad impact that it has, is essential to understanding how structures of inequity are maintained and how they might be dismantled.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia UP, 2021) reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason.Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is writing a nonfiction book harder than you thought it would be? This episode explores: What your reader needs from you, and why. Which writing struggles are the most common, and how to fix them. How to make sure your purpose in writing your book isn’t getting lost. Ways to more effectively focus on what you need to say. What to polish up [and how to do that] before you send it off. Why you can send it out before it’s “perfect.” Our guest is: Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer who earned a PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is a publishing consultant and developmental editor for academic authors, and offers a free newsletter entitled Manuscript Works. Before starting her consulting business, she was a scholar and academic whose research focused on lifestyle choices; and taught at New York University in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. She now lives in Los Angeles with her family, and is a two-time Jeopardy champion.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction, by Jack Hart The Grant Writing Guide, by Betty S. Lai The Book Proposal Book, by Laura Portwood-Stacer Laura's template on how to write an introduction Laura's template on Reverse Outlining 7 Mistakes I Made When I Published My Academic Book by Laura Portwood-Stacer How To Impress an Acquisitions Editor The Academic Life podcast on how to revise your dissertation so a university press will want to publish it The Academic Life podcast Do You Need A Developmental Editor? The Academic Life podcast on University Press Submissions and The Peer Review The Academic Life podcast about marketing your scholarly book The Academic Life podcast on writing a book proposal The Academic Life episode on open-access publishing Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, as we learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sally Wilson, VP of Publishing at Emerald opens up about the challenges publishers are facing in contending with the onset of the mass adoption of AI tools including ChatGPT, and its ramifications for scholarly publishing. She also talks about the potential positive use cases for ChatGPT for reducing inequality in publishing. In addition, Sally discusses the nature of mission-based publishing and leading the charge in tackling United Nations SDG goals in publishing.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation (Cornell UP, 2023) rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to Einstein's mania for African art and Benjamin's obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors' literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting which that reimagines the relationship between author and text, source and medium. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in surprising conversation with James sharpens the contours of collecting as aesthetic and political praxis underpinned by dangerous passions. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future.Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, these three authors engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting's long history in the spoils of war and conquest. As Pfeifer demonstrates, more than an archive or taxonomy, modernist collecting practices became a radical, creative endeavor—the artist as collector, the collector as artist.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why is giving a presentation so stressful? Is your heart supposed to race? And how do you gain more confidence? This episode explores: How to feel more connected to your audience. Why feeling some “stage-fright” might be a good thing. What your audience needs from you. How to use tools to “break the ice” like asking your listeners a great question. A discussion of the article “How to Cope with Presentation Anxiety,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Dr. James M. Lang Our guest is: Dr. James M. Lang, who is the author of six books, writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and edits a series of books on teaching and learning in higher education for West Virginia University Press. A former Professor of English and Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University, he stepped down from full-time academic work in 2021 to concentrate on his writing and teaching and public speaking. He has consulted with the United Nations on a multi-year project to develop teaching materials in ethics and integrity for high school and college faculty, and is the recipient of a 2016 Fulbright Specialist Grant, and the 2019 Paul Ziegler Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship. Jim and his wife formed the Lang Family Foundation, which provides grants to non-profit organizations dedicated to the alleviation of poverty and homelessness, support for the environment and the arts, and funding for libraries and public education. Recent grant recipients include the INTERFAITH HOSPITALITY NETWORK OF GREATER WORCESTER, a shelter for families with children; the WORCESTER PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION; and ABBY’S HOUSE, a shelter for women in need of support services.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Chronicle of Higher Education article "Should We Stop Grading Class Participation?" by James Lang “Distracted Minds: Why You Should Teach Like a Poet,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by James Lang Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, by James Lang Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, by James Lang and Flower Darby The Academic Life podcast episode Archival Kismet: Lessons in Launching an Online Conference The Academic Life podcast episode Making the Most of Academic Conferences Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For over twenty years, James W. Cortada has pioneered research into how information shapes society. In Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments and Businesses (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), he tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. Cortada argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it easier to manage and access. He looks at what major disciplines have done to shape the nature of modern information, devoting chapters to the most obvious ones. Cortada argues that understanding how some features of information evolved is useful for those who work in subjects that deal with their very construct and application, such as computer scientists and those exploring social media and, most recently, history. The Birth of Modern Facts builds on Cortada's prior books examining how information became a central feature of modern society, most notably as a sequel to All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (OUP, 2016) and Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices