After the First Book: Community, Routine, Project Lifecycle

This will be my last post in my time guest-blogging here this month. In my prior posts I’ve talked about how it felt to write my dissertation and my book and about the practical organization of the work. Now I want to talk a little about life after the book. Obviously this is a new stage (I have a book now! Cool! … now what?!) but I didn’t see this stage coming. I’ve tended to see major milestones as stopping points, I think because it’s been so much work and felt so consequential to hit those marks, that I’ve tended to forget that after the milestone there’s more to do. I’ve started to think about this new stage, its challenges, and my efforts at navigating those challenges, in terms of project lifecycle, daily routine, and intellectual community.

How I went from dissertation to book: escaping blank pages, part 2

I talked in my last post about how I went over my dissertation and pulled bits out that I identified as containing the seeds of the book I wanted to write, and how I catalogued those bits. In what follows I’m going to talk about how I went from having basically an organized collection of remnants from my dissertation to really beginning my book.

Once I had gone through all of the raw material the way I described last time, I called the result a skeleton file. It was basically a heavily annotated outline including large amounts of notes and fragments of text. The next step I took was to print the skeleton file and read over it to see if I put everything in the right place - some of the notes under section 2 of the chapter plan might really be better under section 4, say. Those discoveries also sometimes helped me see that I needed to restructure the plan of the chapter a little. In reviewing the skeleton I also sometimes realized there were sections for which I needed to do further reading and research, and that I might need a new section sometimes. All of this gave me more tasks for my to-do list, but fairly well-defined and finite ones. I set about filling in those sections with notes on primary and secondary sources.

How I went from dissertation to book: escaping blank pages, part 1

I shy away from blank pages as a writer - all that empty space, and me with nothing to say…! Blank pages are harder to face the more the filled pages will eventually be judged, such as when I wrote my book proposal, and the greater the number of blank pages it feels like there are, as when I first sat down thinking “I’m going to start my book now.” Last time I mentioned that I’ve looked for ways to, in effect, make the page less blank. I’ve also looked for ways to make it feel like I have fewer blank pages in front of me, by breaking big projects up into lots of small tasks. In what follows I want to tell you how I did this with my article, my book proposal, and the process of moving from dissertation to book.

Creating Context: Sociality vs Bad Feelings, part II

I wrote in my last post about needing intellectual community. As I mentioned at the end of that post, one important source of intellectual community in my writing life has been the writing group I co-convene at Drake where I work. In what follows, I’m going to talk a little about our writing group. As I’ll discuss a little below, ASLH-provided intellectual community has been very important to me as well. That reflects a real strength of legal history as a subfield, in my view. I also get into how how I’ve organized my own writing life - mostly focusing on what I try for in my daily(ish) writing routine, in order to keep active as a scholar given everything else I have on my plate. I want to stress again that I don’t intend any of this prescriptively. If you haven’t tried what I’ve tried, you might and see what happens, but your mileage may vary. Likewise, if you’re doing things as a writer that I’m not, please share that so I can try it out.

As I mentioned, I co-facilitate and co-organize a campus writing group with my colleague, Professor En Li. Our writing group meets approximately monthly during the semester. At each meeting we write for about half an hour together, first thing. The first meeting of the semester is dedicated to briefly introducing the plan for the writing group, then involves check-ins and getting to know each other. Everyone introduces themselves and then we talk about how the last semester or “break” between semesters went (do we ever really get breaks?) in terms of writing, and what our plans, goals, and anticipated challenges are for the current semester or summer. In the remaining meetings, after a short session spent writing quietly and a short session for check-in and logistical questions (such as “how do I approach editors to ask if I can send them my book proposal?”) and writing-life management (“how do you manage to get work done? How do you organize your writing week?”) the rest of the time is dedicated to one or two people workshopping work-in-progress. (If anyone's interested in trying to set up a writing group, we found Jensen's advice in her book helpful. Some of that advice is in this Chronicle essay. We differ from Jensen, though, in our emphasis on work-in-progress workshopping.)

Creating Context: Sociality vs Bad Feelings, part I.

I wrote in my last post about the writing process I used as I worked my way out of a nasty bout of writers’ block. Those individual techniques were very helpful to me, but equally important was the collective setting in which I did the work. In this post, I talk a little about the writing groups I was in, and the mutual writing support I was part of, with friends and colleagues while in graduate school. I then talk about some of the challenges I've had in maintaining a writing practice after finishing graduate school.

I wrote a great deal of my dissertation next to or across a table from several friends and people who I became friends with because we worked near each other that way. I can’t remember exactly how and when it started but I remember clearly asking another grad student friend something like “uhhhh are you working this week and if so can I come and work in your vicinity while you work, please?” By that point I was already part of a private workshop group with some other friends, and there were a lot of other workshops offering opportunities to get feedback on work and to read others’ work. I enjoyed the workshopping and got a great deal out of it, in terms of my own work. (For instance: at one point, my friend and colleague Joe Haker said to me something like “you often reference the part of Rediker’s Slave Ship book where he talks about the violence of abstraction and that’s because you think there are real social practices of abstraction that happen and which are violent.” It shaped my dissertation immensely and my book too.) I also benefited immensely from reading others’ work. I eventually figured out, though, that I lacked something in my writing life that I very much needed: some kind of writing support. I didn’t know what that lack was, I just felt scared and was procrastinating a lot and needed help to even start typing. That help was upstream, so to speak, from intellectual engagement with the content of my writing. I wasn’t sure what that help would look like but I hoped that maybe with another person nearby I would feel merely afraid, instead of feeling an immobilizing terror. It turns out I was right. Working near someone else turned the volume knob on my negative writing emotions down to a level where I could work.

Organizing Myself: Process vs Bad Feelings, part 2

In my last post I wrote about getting writer’s block while in graduate school, after having written a rough draft of the dissertation. This post is the second half of the story, in which I discuss beginning to work again. First I talk about how I dealt with writer’s block specifically, then I turn to how I set about doing the actual revisions on my dissertation. That revision process also involved some aspects of emotional self-regulation that helped me not fall back into writer's block.

Amid my dissertation malaise I really turned a corner when I finally admitted writing felt impossible - I truly did not believe I could finish the dissertation - and that I hated doing it. This was a hard thing to say out loud. Quitting was not an option, I was the only income and source of insurance for my family, and I’d gone to grad school in part to escape years of employment insecurity, so the thought of trying to figure out how to do anything else was terrifying as well. (As I type this I am aware that I was naive about the state of the academic job market when I went to grad school in 2005 or so. I am also aware that the market is even worse now than it was when I finally graduated in 2014. Graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty have been massively failed in multiple ways by a lot of powerful people and institutions.)

Having admitted that writing the dissertation felt impossible but that I still had to write it somehow, my job became figuring out how to spend my time doing something I hated and that I didn’t believe I could succeed at. In effect I had to find a way to make my putting in the time to do the work not contingent upon how I felt about doing the work. I still didn’t believe I could finish the dissertation, but I knew that the only shot I had at finishing was to spend a lot of time writing.

Organizing Myself: Writing Process vs Bad Feelings (part 1 of 2)

One email, six excruciating months. “Dear Nate, We were excited to read the draft of your dissertation. What a great project! We’ve attached a copy with comments from both of us and look forward to seeing where it goes from here.” My co-advisors sent me that around July 2013. (Full transparency: this is a recreation on my part, I don’t remember the exact words and I am no longer able to locate that email. On the details my memory is foggy - an effect, I am sure, inflicted by the job market, multiple moves, having multiple young kids, and the demands of the job - but I recall the heart of the experience keenly.)

A Better Book: Development Editors

              Today’s post concerns the secret weapon of many an excellent (legal history) author, the development editor. I worked with two on my book, Almost Citizens. They were crucial to my learning curve. Without them, I would never have crafted a book that resembled the vision in my head.

              Before starting my book, I had never contemplated paying someone to help me improve my writing. Legal history is a specialized area, and I chose my words carefully to hew to what the sources supported. I worried that someone from outside the field would seek to simplify or expand my claims in ways that I would just end up reversing. The problem was that I also knew that I could benefit from fresh eyes on my writing. By the time I’d drafted a few chapters and signed with Cambridge University Press, I felt confident about my narrative structure and cast of characters. But I found it more difficult to do smaller-scale reorganizations and line edits. This was partly because I was so close to the manuscript. It was also because writing is a skill, and I had more to learn.

Despite having many generous readers, none seemed likely candidates to become writing mentors. Colleagues and reviewers grappled with my work and provided incisive comments. But that feedback almost always involved the substance of the argument rather than its tone and constituent sentences. Given the economic realities of book publishing, many publishers hardly do any editing of manuscripts in progress. I did have the good fortune to publish with American Society for Legal History’s book series (which I discuss here). Sally Gordon was my editor there, and she was a tireless and skilled reader. But she soon saw that the book and I could both gain from more editorial engagement than she could devote to a single book in her series. So she recommended that I consider a development editor.

              I had never heard the term. Perhaps because I live just down the road from Hollywood, my mind immediately went to the entertainment executives who tell show runners that their sitcoms need more dogs or a kooky sister to really draw in the millennials. But (spoiler alert!) that was not whom I was to encounter. The editors I would work with helped me produce the best possible version of my book. Sometimes, such work is called development editing. Sometimes it goes by different names.

              I sought someone who could help me make my prose sing (or at least hum occasionally) without sacrificing nuance and accuracy. Given my topic, that meant an editor who could engage legal and historical arguments, had a sense of the evidentiary norms in the field, and understood the potential audiences for the work. But finding such an editor is a bit like turning up a good contractor for a renovation; you ask around, check out samples of the person’s work, and ultimately take a leap of faith that the (intellectual) place that you lay your head will be transformed for the better.

              I had the good fortune to work with two excellent development editors. I learned of both through admired colleagues who sang the praises of having collaborated with them. The first was Grey Osterud, an accomplished academic historian. Rather than teach, she complements her research with editing colleagues’ work. I was thus confident from the outset that she knew and honored the standards of academic history. Once I had the manuscript drafted, I undertook a rewrite with Pamela Haag, an author of serious histories for broader audiences. Notably, she also has a contract with Yale University Press for a style guide for the scholar-writer that I look forward to adding to my shelf soon.

              As Grey and Pamela helped me improve the book’s prose, they were also teaching me to be a better writer. One set of lessons had to do with the difficulties of evaluating choices about organization when one is too close to the text. Because I was circulating individual chapters to colleagues for feedback, I tried to put enough at the front of each chapter to orient them. The result was bloated chapter introductions. My development editors saw the problem immediately. They worked with me to shorten the chapter introductions and have them serve more as bridges between chapters than as introductions to standalone essays. Similarly, my immersion in the particularities of the book’s events had led me to subdivide the book’s chronology into overly narrow chronological bands. As Grey and Pamela perceived, such fine distinctions muddied the broader argument rather than clarifying it. Thus, a chapter that I had written with six sections, one for each of three characters at each of two times (ABCABC), came to contain just three character-centered sections (ABC).

              Careful editing by others is a wonderful way to discover one’s own writing tics. I had been particularly blind to two. I wrote long, intricate sentences and was overly fond of metaphors. I had to learn to reduce clauses and interjections, break up sentences, and clarify which verbs and nouns went together in what ways. Similarly, I had to unmix metaphors and close them out before they ceased to clarify. The difficulty in both cases was less fixing the problems than perceiving them in the first place. Grey and Pamela sensitized me to my propensity to create these tangles, which was all I needed to start fixing them.

              Like many historians, I revel in the details and complexity of what I study. Seeing the danger, my dissertation committee co-chair Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof counseled that my job was to over-claim and that his job was to rein me in. But knowing that I should trim and sum up did not wholly cure me. My development editors urged me to go further. Curate evidence. Don’t cut one of five quotations; leave just one. Remove tangents. Lead with bold claims. Qualify them later. Or don’t. The result was much more accessible prose. Arguments rose to the surface, no longer drowned by my sea of evidence.

There is one big downside to a development editor: she costs money. How much varies by who you hire, for how long, and for what. But price tags in the thousands of dollars would be common. The best solution is to have someone else pay. My law school (USC’s Gould School of Law) is extremely generous in its support for junior scholars’ work. While schools and departments may vary substantially in what they are able to offer, it is always worth asking. Knowing that peer institutions have offered similar funding can sometimes help shake out extra funds.

Had I had to pay for my development editors entirely out of pocket, I might have balked at using them or using them so extensively. In my case, that would have been a mistake. Their services were worth far more than the cost. As an early-stage scholar, the benefits were quite large. I have many productive years left in which to benefit from what I have learned in terms of writing and argumentation. The book is stronger too. That matters because the book is my debut in legal history as a mature scholar. It was also the centerpiece of my file for tenure (which I just received--Yay!).

My biggest fear when I began working with development editors was that I would not recognize the final text of the book as my own prose. In fact, the opposite was true. By the time I began working with Grey, I largely knew what I wanted to argue, which historical actors and narratives I wanted to feature, and what evidence I wanted to rely upon. But I found it frustratingly hard to translate the book that I had in my head into words on the page. As Grey and then Pamela and I worked on the prose, the gap between it and my envisioned book narrowed considerably (albeit with some nice additions suggested by my development editors that I had not foreseen). Almost Citizens ended up being very much my book—even more so than I had at first hoped.

--Sam Erman

Balancing tenure and promotion

Tenure and promotion processes can vary at each institution. At Auburn, readers of your tenure file get the summer to review your file and write their letters. By mid-August, the file is disseminated to your senior colleagues for review and a vote.  The file then goes to a college committee for a vote. At this point, if the college vote is positive, the Associate Dean might tell you to “pop the champagne” while waiting an additional three months for the University committee to vote (I happily followed her suggestion). In my case, the Dean told me that by the time I heard from the University committee, I would be on to new projects and the letter would almost feel anticlimactic. While the first part of her statement was correct, the latter was not. I don’t know if I’m unique in this regard.  I don’t know if the stress of having kids along the way or the multiple revisions I’d had to make made me feel differently about that letter.  I do know that almost a year later, I still feel like I am basking in the glow. 

Getting tenure feels great. But as many colleagues will warn you, it does not get easier. I still work most weekends and some late nights. I still feel behind much of the time, or like I almost—but not quite—have my act together.  The demands on my time and energy are more numerous, not less.

But somehow things are different. I think part of the difference is, of course, the security that tenure provides. I also think getting tenure has helped me have more confidence in myself and my work. I know how hard it has been to write my article and my book, and to teach multiple new preps over the years. Making it through all of that has given me increasing self-assurance in my own abilities and more forgiveness for my shortcomings.

I’m also more realistic about what I can accomplish and try to say no more often.  I now ask myself a series of questions when someone asks me to do something.  Do I really want to do the task? Is it important for my research, teaching, or other responsibilities? Will I regret it if I say no? Am I just agreeing to do this task because I feel guilty or obligated?  I know my time is precious and valuable (to me, at least!), so I try to reserve it for the things that matter most to me.

And I’ve come to accept that prioritizing the things that are important to me might mean I publish less often than other colleagues and friends.  This realization continues to be a tough one for me. I definitely have a tendency to compare myself to others. I know I need to get over that (and I’m working on it). I now make choices based on what I’m passionate about and what I want to accomplish. Some of those accomplishments will be publications, presentations, or other academic goals, but many will not. In the past eighteen months, especially, my priorities have shifted to include more volunteer time and work in local progressive causes. I also get to spend more time with my family. Finally, I also value my “me time”.  I see these things as an investment in myself and my sanity. Now that I feel somewhat more confident in my abilities and my professional life, I have also learned how important it is to balance my work with the many other areas of life.  I see these things not as distractions, but as critically necessary elements of a well-rounded person. But I still want to keep researching and writing, too!

In the months since I received tenure, I have faced the mountainous task of starting a second major research project.  The demands of teaching, service, and other personal and professional tasks continue.  It is often too easy to push work on my next project to the side.  But I’ve been warned more than once by other colleagues and friends of the dangers of languishing as an associate professor.  I do want to keep actively participating in the scholarly community.

I vowed to keep moving forward on my research and writing.  I spent the summer after tenure catching up on some reading and thinking about ideas for the next book.  I then spent the fall applying for a few grants and making plans for future research trips.  This semester (spring 2018), I am teaching a class that involves research on slavery in Auburn and the surrounding area in hopes that the research we do in class will contribute to the foundations of my new project.  Linking up my research and teaching so directly will force me to make progress during the semester, when I might otherwise push off research tasks in favor of putting out the immediate fires of teaching and service.

Although I am still working out the particulars, I plan to focus my next project on slavery in Alabama. Practical concerns rate high on the list of reasons for this choice.  But I am also excited to look into a place where slavery was so important (Alabama had the fourth largest enslaved population in the nation on the eve of the American Civil War) and that has received relatively little scholarly attention.  I look forward to sharing with many of you what I find. 

Thank you all for reading my posts and to the Legal History Blog for inviting me to write for you all this month.  It has been a fun and eye-opening experience to reflect on the process of research and writing and think about what kinds of lessons I can take from it.  I hope some of my mistakes and accomplishments will be helpful to future readers and other scholars struggling through the challenges of writing a book and launching a career. 

Balancing the tenure clock

The realities of the tenure clock can result in enormous pressure on faculty no matter what the circumstances of a particular person or institution.  There is no one-size-fits-all model for succeeding in a tenure-track position.  Sometimes the department, college, and university expectations for tenure and promotion are clearly communicated. Often, they are not. Even when you know what’s expected for tenure, the timeframe can be tight and nerve-wrecking.  And even when you have met the requirements, a certain anxiety creeps in and seems unavoidable.  This post explains my journey to tenure and promotion. Tomorrow’s post will then conclude with a few thoughts about life on the “other side” as a tenured associate professor (spoiler alert: it doesn’t get easier, but it does get better!).

In my previous post, I explained how I turned in my initial book submission in late May 2014, two weeks before my son’s arrival.  Sending in my manuscript meant I had the first several months of my son’s life free from research to focus on my baby. When I received my initial readers’ reports that November, I slowly returned to writing and revising.  See my earlier post on balancing feedback for more on those initial reports and incorporating their suggestions.

Fitting in my revisions around teaching three classes and caring for two young children was no small challenge.  It took me nine months to complete what I hoped would be the last round of revisions.  I sent the revised manuscript to the press the day before starting class in fall 2015.  [You might be noticing a pattern of how deadlines usually work for me.] 

Late in the fall of 2015, I received two new reports on the revised manuscript from my initial readers, Martha Jones and reader #2.  These reports were probably the hardest set of feedback I received because it meant that my book required additional, substantial revisions. The ticking of my tenure clock grew louder.  I never believed the book was perfect.  But I had hoped that any additional suggestions from my second reader would include a recommendation that it be published.  Instead, my editor indicated that the book would be sent to a third reader to determine its fate. If the third reader recommended publication, I would be good and my tenure application in fall 2016 should be safe. After many years of working of research and writing, it felt like so much was riding on what one person thought of the book.

Martha Jones, who identified herself to me at this point in the process (and gave me permission to name her in these posts), continued to recommend publication. But she challenged me on chronology, in particular.  She warned that using a thematic structure for the book obscured a sense of change over time in the St. Louis freedom suits. She also pushed me to define my place in the historiography.  I knew that tracing change is important for a historian, but by this point in my revision, I felt wedded to the thematic structure of the book. In my view, the St. Louis freedom suits did not lend themselves to a simple chronological organization. The cases began with smaller numbers that increased rapidly by the mid-1820s and then dropped off sharply after 1845. From the mid-1820s until the mid-1840s, a similar set of issues came up in court and resulted in similar overall patterns of outcomes. To help address her concern, I resolved to make these periods of chronological change clearer in the revisions.     

I was less sure how to respond to the feedback I received from reader #2.  The second reader remained frustrated with the appellate material I included in the book despite my efforts to trim it down and explain its place.  Given that I argue for the importance of using local court records, I understand this reader’s frustration with my use of appellate cases for context.  I made the decision to use appellate cases mostly for practical reasons.  The tenure deadline meant that I simply did not have time to complete additional large-scale research in local courts across the slaveholding states.  Until additional local studies of freedom suits are published, the appellate material remains the best way to contextualize St. Louis’s story.  The second reader also had concerns about my use of the term “legal culture,” asking me to clarify further not only what legal culture is, but also what it is not.  These comments reminded me that legal culture cannot be everything or the term had no meaning.  I then crafted a more precise definition that made clear what I meant by using the term “legal culture”.    

Reading back through the manuscript with these critiques in hand, I felt the creep of self-doubt and discouragement.  I knew the second reader was right about both of these issues, but I was unsure how to fix them.  My editor cautioned me against making too many changes while waiting for the third reader’s report. Because so much was riding on the third reader’s evaluation, the editor sought out someone who had time to read the manuscript quickly. A swift response would allow me time for further revisions or, in the worst-case scenario, submitting to another press.  I was panic-stricken while waiting for the third report. I had sleepless nights and anxiety-ridden days.  [Post continues after the jump break.]

Balancing a new job

Writing today’s post, I am acutely aware of how often I failed in my struggle to achieve balance in the various requirements of a new tenure-track job: teaching, research, and service (and in some cases, outreach or administration). So LHB readers, you might want to take any advice offered here with a snicker or a grain of salt. I do hope that my struggles might result in some useful insights for those of you facing a similar challenge. 

I started my job teaching at Auburn in the fall of 2010.  My first semester involved two large (200 students in each) sections of World History I (from the dawn of time to the 18^th century!) and a 13-student graduate seminar in Southern History.  Prior to starting my position, my independent teaching experience consisted of a 9-student summer U.S. survey and a 7-student senior writing seminar in my research area, both at Duke. 

To say I was unprepared for what awaited me in my new job is an understatement. My first semester was crushing—I was nervous, overwhelmed, out of my league. My research and writing seemed like a distant memory. My manuscript was one final, impossibly large task on my never-ending to-do list. I never forgot about it, but I also never got around to doing much research or writing. Luckily Auburn kept my service load pretty light. I was on one department committee, but it didn’t require much time.

I have no magic solution to the craziness of the first year of teaching. I do have a few words of advice that I followed as best I could. Much of this advice still applies to my regular challenges of balancing my workload.

My first point could (and should!) be repeated in all of my posts on the struggle to achieve any type of balance. First and foremost, be willing to forgive yourself and let things go when you fall short of your expectations. Even the people who seem the most on top of things sometimes—or often—miss the mark. Lawyers, professors, and grad students are usually highly motivated people. But the tenure-track asks a lot of new professors, and sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all. Dwelling on what you have not managed to accomplish or what you wish you had done does you no good. Forgiveness and moving on are how I get through most of my days.

A strong support system is another element that allowed me to adjust to the new faculty workload. I was fortunate enough to start my job at the same time as another history faculty member. We became fast friends. We spent many late nights in the office together, and made plenty of fast food runs as we logged long hours to get the lectures written, the reading done, and the emails answered. She has remained a source of advice, encouragement, and commiseration over the years, as our workloads have only gotten heavier.

If you don’t make that kind of instant connection in your department—or even if you do—finding people outside of your department is helpful, too. Look for opportunities to mingle with other faculty and make new connections. Orientation, college/school functions, or groups connected to particular hobbies or interests can all help one meet faculty outside of your department. My partner Kevin was also a big help with my home workload, as the dishes and laundry piled up. He continues to provide enormous support, both with housework and also listening and helping me sort out my challenges. Like many academics, I now have family and friends spread all over the country. Regular phone calls to friends and family members can be a huge help in coping with the stress of the first year.

Here’s some advice I wish I had followed: when you start teaching, less is more. Less reading can still make for great discussion. Shorter writing assignments allow for more quality feedback and focus on skill practice for your students.  Keep lectures to outlines, unless you’re teaching something completely outside of your comfort zone, as many of us do sometimes. You don’t have to be great at all of it right away. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is an amazing teacher. There will be hiccups along the way. Your best bet is to innovate and experiment a little at a time to see what works best in your new job with a new population of students.  For me, teaching is always about experimenting and being open to adjustments.

Seek advice from senior colleagues when you can. At Auburn, our department has a strong tradition of sharing syllabi for ideas and regularly discussing teaching issues as they arise. Finding a trusted colleague who has been there a while to approach with questions is an invaluable asset. Our department does not have a formal mentoring program for new faculty, but if possible, seek out these kinds of opportunities to learn from others’ experiences and get to know the department culture.

I have read lots of advice about making time for research.  This advice includes scheduling regular research and writing time, getting up early to write, and prioritizing writing before you begin you class prep and meetings.  I’ve never been great about this balance, but I continue to try. (More on some of my strategies in the next post.) One of my goals for 2018 is to make regular time every week for research and writing, even if it’s not a lot of time. No guarantee that I’ll be able to make that a reality. But I do believe that the best practice for balancing writing with a heavy teaching load is to make it a regular part of your schedule.  A bit more on this after the jump break.

Balancing feedback

One of the greatest blessings I’ve had in my journey to book publication is the feedback I’ve received along the way.  While feedback from others is invaluable to the scholarly process, it can also present some challenges on how to proceed when readers don’t agree.  Today’s post will attempt to offer some advice, or at least share some experiences, related to incorporating others’ suggestions for your work.

As someone who suffers regularly from imposter syndrome, I continue to ask for feedback on nearly everything I write.  I have benefitted enormously from the generosity of mentors, peers, and senior scholars who have offered suggestions for improving my work.  Writing my book’s acknowledgments section was a highlight of the publication process for me, and it ended up being pretty lengthy (and I’m still sure I missed somebody!).  But sometimes, receiving lots of feedback can present its own challenges.

Graduate students often face this dilemma when committee members disagree.  Sometimes the disagreements are loud and unpleasant.  Sometimes the student gets caught in the middle of personal feuds or professional differences.  Luckily for me, my committee members never reached this level of disagreement, though they did not always see eye-to-eye on how I should write my dissertation.  At a couple of moments during the writing and revision process, sets of comments from my different committee members even directly contradicted each other—i.e. “needs more historiography”, “historiography should be relegated to the footnotes”.  At my dissertation defense, I did my best to use these varying perspectives to my advantage by allowing the committee to debate some of their differing suggestions. 

Someone once told me that the best dissertation defenses involved the committee talking more about the future direction of the work than the student. If that’s the case (and in my experience at my own and subsequent defenses, it is), my defense was top notch.  At the time, I thought this was great because it got me off the hook. I scribbled furiously to capture as much of their combined wisdom as possible and had to say relatively little.  But this was more than an avoidance technique; I soaked in the feedback as much as possible, hoping to get a sense of how scholars from varying perspectives might respond to my work.  Bringing together a strong, diverse committee of interests helps your work speak to wider audiences. 

I followed my Ph.D. graduation with a memorable year in Madison as the Law and Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s law school.  My postdoc kicked off with the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute, a gathering of junior scholars who spend a week reading and discussing various works of legal history together.  The group then uses a second week to read and comment on each other’s article-length writing samples (I highly recommend the Hurst Institute to any junior scholars who might be reading this!).  That week, I collected a giant binder full of feedback from my fellow “Hursties” and our fearless leader Barbara Welke. 

Shortly after the Hurst Institute, the supervisor for my postdoc, Howard Erlanger, convened a meeting with several Wisconsin history and law faculty who generously read and commented on my entire dissertation.  Once again, I soaked in lots of excellent advice, rushing to get it all down (thanks again to these excellent readers!).  The meeting felt a bit like a second dissertation defense—in a good way.  I learned so much from the broad perspectives represented. 

During my year in Madison, I followed the advice of my Duke mentors.  They recommended I spend the year reading broadly, working on broader conceptual issues, and digging into some of the new research I added to the book.  [side note: this advice might have been different if I did not already have a job at Auburn lined up after my postdoc!] I sat in on a graduate course in the African Diaspora, and I plowed through reading lists on various topics (legal culture, the history of the jury, etc.) with an assistant professor working on similar conceptual issues.  I also completed significant additional research in appellate freedom suit opinions.  At the end of the year, I drafted an article that I submitted to the Journal of Southern History and awaited the first anonymous responses to my research. 

If by this point, my experience with feedback sounds typical, the readers’ reports from the JSH are definitely not the norm.  Six months of waiting to hear news of my article resulted in six readers’ reports.  Sorting through comments like “this is a good but not great article” left me humbled but determined to guide the article to publication.  Digesting so many different sets of written comments left me with patches of hair missing as I struggled to make contradictory suggestions somehow line up. Some reviewers wanted additional detail about the statutes and particular legal forms of the freedom suits, while other comments suggested that I should streamline this information or cut it. All of the readers wanted additional historiographical context, but they varied in terms of what historiographies I should primarily address.

It would never have occurred to me at that stage to call the editor of the Journal. While I cannot remember who suggested that I do that, I can strongly advise anyone in a similar situation to ask for this type of conversation.  Sometimes when dealing with multiple sets of (contradictory) comments, the best thing to do is to try to bring in someone from the outside.  Whether the person is from the publishing side or a trusted colleague, mentor, or senior scholar, an outside perspective can really help you make sense of things.  More on this after the jump…

Balancing interests

In today’s post, I will share how I ultimately landed on the research project that became my book.  Like many of your stories, I imagine, it is one that involves dedicated teachers, visceral reactions to the material they taught me, a bit of luck, and a willingness to make adjustments to my plans along the way.

Before entering Tulane as a bright-eyed undergraduate, I knew I loved history and wanted to major in it, but I also planned to go to law school when I finished college. My love for history only grew as I began my studies. I took a course during my sophomore year of college on slavery and freedom in the antebellum South taught by Dr. Betty Wood, a visiting scholar from the University of Cambridge.  I was hooked.  I remember feeling so frustrated by my history education to that point and angry that I knew practically nothing about the system of chattel slavery that existed for so much of the history of the European colonies in America and the United States.  I read Solomon Northup’s narrative, recently made famous by the movie Twelve Years a Slave.  I read scholarly analyses of slavery and debated its meaning in class. The indignation of not knowing the extent or the horrors of this topic lit a fire under me that lingered long after my initial exposure in Dr. Wood’s class.  I imagine that other researchers must have similar stories of being drawn to the topics left out of high school history courses. 

After a couple of years of college, my interest in law school waned.  I was still drawn to the study of law, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer.  If I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure that I had a good sense of what being a lawyer was actually like, either.  I didn’t want to spend three years away from full-time reading and studying history (though I recognize now that law school does involve quite a bit of history, too!). While having these doubts about law school, I had the great fortune to take an American Legal History class with the late Dr. Judith Schafer.  Dr. Schafer made everything click.  I realized I could combine my interests in history and law by pursuing a graduate degree in legal history.

Dr. Schafer was also a scholar of the legal history of slavery, so her course introduced me to this particular sub-field.  While I was searching for a senior thesis topic, Dr. Schafer sent me to meet with the late Marie Windell (an archivist at the University of New Orleans, where the manuscript records of the Louisiana Supreme Court are housed).  With Ms. Windell’s advice, I wrote a senior thesis on a Louisiana Supreme Court case, Eulalie and her children v. Long & Mabry (9 La. Ann. 9 (1854)), which has since become the subject of the brilliant plenary address (at the ASLH meeting in Miami in 2013) and an article by the most recent ASLH President, Rebecca J. Scott (“Social Facts, Legal Fictions, and the Attribution of Slave Status: The Puzzle of Prescription”, Law and History Review, 35:1(2017): 9-30).  My senior thesis was my first effort at archival research, and I loved it.

With some basic research skills in hand, and my newfound passion for issues related to slavery and freedom, I applied to graduate school.  I was delighted to be accepted to the Ph.D. program at Duke, where I planned to work with Laura Edwards and Peter Wood.  That part of my plan worked out.  My tentative dissertation project idea?  Not so much.  At the time, I had hoped to shift my interests in slavery, freedom, and law from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth.  I was fascinated with the seeming contradictions between the rhetoric of the Revolution and the existence of chattel slavery among the nation’s founders.  Like many students, I discovered that a few other scholars had thought about this issue, so I returned to the drawing board. 

The influence of my former mentor, Judy Schafer, made a major difference in the trajectory of my career for a second time.  She emailed me about the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, which includes hundreds of freedom suit case files that had recently been scanned and made available online: a grad student’s dream! (As a side note, in addition to the freedom suits files, the Project also contains collections of cases related to Native Americans, Lewis and Clark, and the fur trade.)  Although I wrote my senior thesis on a nineteenth-century topic, I continued to want to look into the earlier era, but I also needed a masters’ thesis topic for the first-year research seminar I was taking that semester. 

I decided to give the project a try. I soon discovered that this nineteenth-century topic allowed me to dive into the same core issue that sparked my interest in the American Revolution: the relationship between slavery and freedom.  St. Louis was a border city on the Mississippi River with a relatively small—but powerful—elite slaveholding population.  Its location and its population made the city a crossroads between slavery and freedom.  The relationship of St. Louis to the free state of Illinois, for example, raised important questions for the courts. St. Louis judges and juries had to grapple with interstate comity issues in a region with wide variations in personal status.  The richness of the freedom suit files is undeniable. Its vast material on the lives and experiences of enslaved people continues to enthrall me to this day.  Once I read the case files and began writing about them, I knew I had found my long-term project.  Twelve years later, I published my book on the same topic.

In my next post, I will discuss the challenges of balancing feedback from a variety of sources in the writing and publishing process.