EVENT DETAILS

"The Professional Scholarly Writer" - A workshop with William Germano

This four-hour workshop focuses on the academic as publishing scholar: stressing an identity founded on three components – professional scholarly writer – this seminar is a faculty development initiative designed to increase the young scholar’s critical knowledge of academic publishing in relation to her or his own specific writing project.

Conducted in seminar format, the workshop explores strategies for strengthening skills in professional writing and project design as well as scholarly publishing best practice in the print + digital environment. While one focus of the session is the recent Ph.D. and his or her dissertation manuscript, the issues explored extend beyond that horizon: many of the skills required for revising a dissertation are, in fact, the same skills necessary for a productive scholarly writing life.
The session addresses such topics as the dissertation/book problem, the range of options facing the author, the role of self-presentation, the writing trajectory of the academic career, current practice in submission, print and non-print publication options, and the  role of new media in the individual scholar’s writing and research program.
The session should be of interest to any faculty member working in a discipline where “the book” – and its commitment to the narratability of scholarly research -- remains the primary unit of scholarly dissemination. The seminar can accommodate up to 20 participants; UCI humanities faculty, lecturers, and post-docs are eligible to attend.
Feedback is an important component of this seminar. Each proposal submitted by that date will receive written comments at the beginning of our session. Proposals received after the deadline are welcome, but may not be reviewed in time for our session; written comments for these proposals will, however,  be emailed to the author as soon as possible after the event date. Registrants for the workshop who are unable to send on their materials by the deadline are welcome to attend.

How to register
Please email Julia Lupton (jrlupton@uci.edu) by Monday, November 30, 2015 to insure a spot in the workshop. Your message should include your name, department/affiliation, rank/appointment level, and a brief description (title + 100 words) of your project that we can share with the group.  Each participant will then submit a book proposal (5-10 pages) and c.v.  directly to William Germano (germano@cooper.edu) by December 15, 2015. The proposal should include a narrative description of the intended project, a guide to structure (chapters and some indication of their scope and contents), and details on market (competition, comparable titles of interest).
Auditors are welcome. Unfortunately, written comments cannot be made available for auditors’ proposals.
Maximum enrollment: twenty participants (plus auditors).

Seminar leader
William Germano is professor of English Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and author of Getting It Published: a Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 3/e forth. spring 2016) and From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press, 2/e 2013). He writes a biweekly blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog; he has also published essays on writing and publishing in the Chronicle and elsewhere. His scholarly work includes essays on opera, Shakespeare, and cinema. The Tales of Hoffmann (2013) was published in the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series.

His current projects include a guide to revising prose, a cultural history of eye charts, and  Shakespeare at the Opera: A History of Impossible Projects, which considers operatic interpretations of Shakespeare beyond the usual canonical suspects.

During a first career as a scholarly publisher, he worked as editor-in-chief of Columbia University Press and then as vice-president and publishing director at Routledge, a position he held for nineteen years. 

Among the authors he published are many well-known figures in the humanities and social sciences: Theodor Adorno, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sacvan Bercovitch, Kate Bornstein, Edward Branigan, Judith Butler, Terry Castle, Michel de Certeau, Jonathan Culler, Arthur Danto, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, Vine Deloria, Jr., Jacques Derrida, Denis Donoghue, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, James Elkins, Emory Elliott, Dario Fo, Diana Fuss, Peter Galison, Herbert Gans, Marjorie Garber, Sander Gilman, Stephen Greenblatt, Antonio Gramsci, Jerzy Grotowski, David Halperin, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, E. Ann Kaplan, David Kastan, Evelyn Fox Keller, Julia Kristeva, Amitava Kumar, Biddy Martin, Tania Modleski, Antonio Negri, Stephen Orgel, Andrew Parker, Constance Penley, Edward Said, Mark Seltzer, Kaja Silverman, Kenneth Silverman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Stallybrass, Konstantin  Stanislavski, Michael Taussig, Gary Taylor, Cornel West, Raymond Williams, Paul Willis, John Winkler, Jack Zipes, and Slavoj Žižek. Over the past twenty years he has lectured and led seminars on publishing and scholarly writing at colleges and universities across North America, in Europe, New Zealand, and the Persian Gulf.