The Academic Publishing Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Michelle Komie is publisher for art and architectural and urban history at Princeton University Press, where since 2014 she has been the person behind numerous important, and beautiful, books. Previously, she spent over a decade in acquisitions at Yale University Press. I asked Michelle about what she looks for in a project, how she communicates with authors, and the entire process of bringing a book to publication. I think first-time authors in particular will find her answers both informative and encouraging.

Mentioned:

Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages.

Essays of E.B. White.

This is an introductory episode for the Academic Publishing Podcast, in which host Lisa Regan talks to Amyrose McCue Gill, with whom she co-founded the academic editing company TextFormations. In this brief chat, they talk about the idea behind this podcast and what to expect in future episodes.

For more about us, visit TextFormations.com. Our email is podcast@textformations.com.

My guest today is Stephanie Porras, professor of art history at Tulane University. Stephanie is the author of multiple books, including, most recently, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe (Penn State UP, 2023). And, she is the former reviews editor of The Art Bulletin, the flagship journal for art history in the US. So, I wanted to talk to Stephanie about book reviews.

Book reviews are one of the most common forms of publication for authors, very much including early-career authors, and they’re also part of a larger set of practices of reviewing that includes peer reviews and tenure letters. I felt Stephanie would be the perfect person to ask about how to write and read a review as she has herself been the author of many reviews; she teaches students how to write them; she’s commissioned an enormous number of them; and, as a book author, she has read many reviews of her own work.

Mentioned:

Karin Wulf, "How to Gut a (Scholarly) Book in 5 Almost-easy Steps," and her follow-up post.

Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India.

Kathryn Renton, Feral Empire.

Emily Wilbourne, Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence.

Email us at podcast@textformations.com.

Ken Wissoker is Senior Executive Editor at Duke University Press where, since arriving in 1991, he has published over 1400 books. Ken acquires books across the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, by authors like Stuart Hall, Jack Halberstam, and Sara Ahmed. Recently, Ken has been vocal about his concern for the financial future of academic publishing - and there are few people who know more about the subject. In this episode, he talks about how the finances of a press work, and how authors should think about the funding of their books, from subventions to list price.

Mentioned:

Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

Emilie Boone, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography

A few of Ken's other appearances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52PR11MgTn0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX0jsOD4wkA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAYtyKb_VJE

Also a useful read:

https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2017/09/14/editorial-director-ken-wissoker-on-why-he-loves-peer-review/

Email us at podcast@textformations.com.

Aaron Hyman is Professor of Art History at the University of Basel. His first book was published by the Getty in 2021; his second is through peer review and under contract at the University of Chicago Press. He has published peer reviewed articles in all of art history’s major disciplinary journals, including twice in the Art Bulletin in just a 3-year span, as well as in specialist and interdisciplinary venues ranging from Print Quarterly to Representations. We talked about peer review from a variety of perspectives – why to pursue it in the first place, how to write toward it, and how to receive and respond to reports, as well as how to write reports oneself. And, because Aaron is on the editorial boards of 21: Inquiries into Art, History and the Visual, and of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, we talked about how journal editors read reports and make decisions about whether to publish. It’s a long conversation, but we cover a lot of ground around a topic at the center of most authors’ publishing lives, and we had a lot to chew on.

Mentioned:

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait.

Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography. 

Sasha Rossman, "Board-er Games: Defining Seventeenth-Century France in Pierre Duval’s Cartographic “enjeux” (ca. 1660)."

Dana Leibsohn is Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art at Smith College and General Editor of Colonial Latin American Review, or CLAR. CLAR is one of the flagship journals for the study of colonial Latin America. It is strongly interdisciplinary, with contributions coming from everywhere from literary studies to history to art history, to indigenous studies; it is published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese; and, as this linguistic breadth suggests, it’s read across wide geographies. So I wanted to talk to Dana about the considerations of editing a journal with that kind of range – what she looks for in submissions, but also how she thinks about the journal’s role in a changing field. We also talked about how she sees the future of academic journals, from peer review to AI.

Mentioned:

Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.

Mariette Navarro, Ultramarine.

Lisa Trever is the Lisa and Bernard Selz Associate Professor of Pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and her department’s Career Officer. Before coming to Columbia, Lisa was a professor in the department of the history of art at UC Berkeley. She co-directs the archaeological research at the ancient center of Pañamarca in Peru. That’s a lot of experience thinking and talking about publishing toward professional goals. So I wanted to talk to her about putting together a publishing plan, and about the advice she gives to graduate students and junior colleagues. We talked about what, where, and when to publish for different career moments – getting a job, keeping a job, and changing jobs.

Mentioned:

Sandra Rozental, The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft.

https://www.panamarca.org/pintando-creatividad

Danielle Callegari is Associate Professor of Italian at Dartmouth College and author of the 2022 book Dante’s Gluttons from Amsterdam University Press. She is also writer-at-large for the magazine Wine Enthusiast, for which she writes long-form articles and reviews, and rates wines. Her popular-audience book A Bite-Sized History of Italy is just out from the New Press. And together with Katie Parla she co-hosts the Italian gastronomy podcast Gola. I asked Danielle how she found her way into public-facing writing, how she thinks about that work in relation to her academic writing, and what strategies she has for anyone who wants to start publishing in popular venues.

A bit of Danielle's popular writing:

Meet the Three Sisters Making Some of Sicily’s Most Exciting Wines

An Island-Hopping Guide to Sicily

Environmental Advocate of the Year Col D’Orcia Is Doing Something Unprecedented

An Eating and Drinking Guide to Venice, Minus the Tourists

Instagram: @drcallegariscabinet

Mentioned:

Daniel Mendelsohn, "Is the Aeneid a celebration of empire or a critique?"

Ashwini Tambe is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University and the former editorial director, from 2011 until 2024, of the interdisciplinary journal Feminist Studies. There’s a key bit of back story to this episode. On two unrelated occasions in my career, authors from very different disciplines each sent me a quite remarkable document that they had received in response to a submission to Feminist Studies. These were letters, written by Ashwini on behalf of the journal, that generously and generatively summed up and responded to reader reports. In these letters, she laid out the readers’ key points, described the strengths and weaknesses of the essay as she and her colleagues saw them, and offered a series of thoughtful suggestions for what the author could do. In each case that I saw, it was great advice, and it was delivered in a notably careful and caring manner. So I wanted to talk to Ashwini about how and why she wrote those documents, and about the role they played in the journal’s broader approach to mentoring.

Mentioned:

Aatish Taseer, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile.