Graduate students in the humanities understand that publishing their work in academic journals is an important step toward landing a tenure track job. Unfortunately, the publishing business itself is opaque and mysterious, leaving students to rely on rumor, myth, and guesswork as they try to feel their way through the process. This workshop attempts to demystify the process by offering an editor’s overview of journal publishing, an account of the various steps between writing an essay and seeing it into print, and strategies for how to navigate the system.
Cristobal Silva is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He specializes in colonial and 18th-century American literature and culture, and in transatlantic literature. His area of emphasis is colonial epidemiology, ranging from early New England to the late eighteenth-century Caribbean and the Haitian Revolution. He is the author of Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of New England Narrative, 1616–1721 (Oxford University Press, 2011), and is currently writing a book titled Republic of Medicine: Epidemiology and the Atlantic Slave Trade, which traces the intersection of 18th-century Western and African medical narratives in the making of national identity. He is co-editing a collection titled Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century with Jennifer Frangos.
