Dissertations, Publishing, Conferences, and Snippet

I’ll do the snippet first: I didn’t get through Clifford’s diary last week. :( So that’s on the schedule for this week again. I got Elizabeth I’s Collected Works in the mail on Friday, so I’m planning to start with speeches and poetry she wrote near her ascension and then later in her reign to see how she represents herself (and whether the representations change over time). I’m particularly interested in finding out how she describes herself as mother (of England) and daughter (of HVIII). (This is her coronation portrait.)

Dissertation & Conferences: a great friend in Mass who actually finished his dissertation said the easiest chapters to write were ones based on conference papers he presented. He recommended doing as many conferences as material (or major ideas) in the diss, just as a place to workshop ideas and work through them once before having to work them into a chapter.

Publishing: My first job at UMass was as an Editorial Assistant for English Literary Renaissance, and it was amazing training for getting ready to submit to a journal. Making sure the work is appropriate to the journal is key, and having an idea of who’s on the local board (and thus reviewing articles) doesn’t hurt either. (If you write on Keats, but the local Keats guy on the editorial board totally disagrees with your approach, even an amazing essay might get vetoed.) The biggest error grad students made was not taking the work up a level from the dissertation--some would even leave in language that gave away it was a dissertation chapter. Just like with grading papers, the amazing essays really stood out. But just like any process where a group makes a decision, one person’s no vote and argument against could sink a really good essay, so don’t take rejections as a necessary statement on the quality of the work. Also, acceptance rates vary with the size of the backlog: at one point, we had 2 years’ worth of essays waiting to be published, so we accepted very few new essays. Again, sometimes the acceptance/rejection just comes down to timing. One thing I really appreciated about ELR is that the editorial board sent out comments on rejected essays, and if they thought the work was good but not appropriate for ELR, they would suggest other journals that might accept the work. From what I understand, most journals don’t do this, but it can be really valuable to submit to ones who do.

The info on chapters and such was really interesting, SafiaK. Thanks for passing along the info.

Another interesting tidbit on dissertation chapters: one of my advisors championed the idea of having one really solid chapter that had a relatively complex or nuanced argument to submit as the writing sample in the job packet, and another chapter that was really interesting but pretty straightforward that could turn into a job talk. The other chapters, she thought, could be not quite so good (but passable) and you’d have what you needed to get from dissertation to job (and then to book, if you wanted to go that route).

GEW, how's the trip prep going?