Historiann

A correspondent on the H-WOMEN listserv wrote in last week:

I have a question that I’d like to pose to list members: which journals are considered “top tier” in the field of women’s and gender history?

There’s a larger context for this inquiry.  For junior faculty members who do women’s and gender history and are tenure track in a history or interdisciplinary department at an R-1 institution,  a record of publishing in prestigious peer reviewed journals is often a pre-condition of successful tenure.  Yet in promotion and tenure committees at various institutional levels, there may be differences of agreement about what constitutes a prestigious journal and what constitutes a mediocre one. I know of at least one case in which a college-level promotion and tenure committee refuted arguments that the journal Feminist Studies was a top-tier publication by comparing it unfavorably with Gender and Society, which I always had the impression was an important journal for social science scholarship on gender but published fewer articles written by historians.  The same committee identified Gender and History as a third-tier journal which was not of sufficient quality and reputation to be considered “acceptable publishing” for a faculty member at that institution.

I don’t want to get bogged down in individual cases, but to ask is there a consensus about what constitutes “top tier” publishing in women’s history?  What standards apply to determine the quality of a journal for this particular field?  I also want to raise the wider question of what strategies junior faculty members can use justify the quality of their work and publishing record in a field like women’s and gender history which may itself suffer from subtle (and not so subtle) intellectual de-legitimization, both among individual faculty and administrators and structurally, at the level of institutions, disciplines, and the academy generally.

One of the editors of Gender and History, Karen Adler, wrote a nice response to refute the claim that G&H is a “third-tier journal:”  Continue Reading »

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Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors has been doing a regular series called “Where are the Women?” which documents the underrepresentation of women authors published in recent editions of elite law journals.  (Check it out–the tables of contents are shocking.)  Laura Spitz yesterday wrote a post documenting the numbers of articles, essays, and comments by male and female authors in law journals from 2001-06, and the numbers are again equally shocking in light of the fact that law schools have nearly equal numbers of women and men.

Spitz’s post is interesting in that it notes that law reviews are edited and produced by students, not by law professors–a quirk unique to law reviews, so far as I know.  She writes, “students are not especially well trained or positioned to meet and address the systemic discrimination felt by women and minorities in trying to get their work published and ‘valued’.”  Spitz continues: 

This is not an especially intuitive observation, and it has been made by lots of others before me. And this discrimination cannot be visited solely on law students (who often make great choices and invariably work very hard). Rather, I think it has more to do with the fact that they are the wrong people to be making these publishing decisions. Not because they are ‘bad’ people (some of my best friends were students), but because their experience and training makes them ill-suited for the task.

I’ve never worked at a journal, and the world of law reviews is something I have no understanding of whatsoever, but I wonder if Spitz is right that (perhaps ironically) students’ “experience and training makes them ill-suited for the task?”  Continue Reading »

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Edward Linenthal, the editor of the Journal of American History and Professor of History at Indiana University, is visiting Potterville, Colorado this week as the Hewit Distinguished Professor of History this year at the University of Northern Colorado.  Yesterday he gave an informal talk to the History faculty there over lunch on the subject of “How to Get Published in the Journal of American History.”  He also provided a lively and in-depth glimpse of how the journal works and some of his priorities as editor.  I caged an invite from my pals at UNC, and found Linenthal so engaging and down-to-earth that I asked him if I could publish my notes on his comments, and he said yes.  So, here you go:

• The numbers:  Linenthal said that they receive 215 submissions a year, and that of those they can publish twenty.  (For those of you who took remedial math like me, that’s an acceptance rate of about 9.3%–ouch!)  Everything is read by a pair of Associate Editors, and of those 215 submissions, perhaps 35-40% are rejected in-house without review.  (When asked which articles were rejected in-house, Linenthal said that it was only those that were very narrowly cast, ”horrendously written,” and/or those that don’t fit the mission of the JAH at all.)   
• The process:  The 60-65% of articles that are sent out to readers are each sent out to four readers, which Linenthal admits can lead to a “cacophony” of opinions that are difficult to sort through.  If you’ve got an article under review at this journal, don’t hang out by your e-mail in-box drumming your fingers:  Linenthal says that he’ll “always go for thoroughness over speed,” every time, but says that their average in responding to authors is four months after submission.  It’s a double-blind review process, and Linenthal says that they absolutely don’t play favorites.  “We’ve pissed off any number of senior scholars” by rejecting their work, “but I say, if you’re at that level and you can’t deal with that kind of criticism–tough!  Get over it.”  Continue Reading »

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While I’m busy cranking out an overdue paper, I’ll leave you with a few tasty morsels I’ve been saving up to share with you on the subject of academic publishing.  Remember:  when you get that rejection letter in the mail (and you will–we all do!), the best thing to do is to read it quickly, put it away for a week or two, then take what’s useful for your revisions and send it back on out to another journal or press.  If you’re thrown by a horse, the best revenge is to get back in the saddle again.  So–giddyap!

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Well, well, well:  If all I have to do to drive up my hits is use the word “adjunct” in a headline, why didn’t you tell me sooner?  Man, that worked better than calling a certain prominent (and dead) early modern British historian a you-know-what!

For all of you pro-pr0n readers out there, you’ll be just thrilled to know that this blog is getting hits when people google the title of a certain trashy flick that was briefly screened Monday night at the University of Maryland.  That’ll teach me to suggest that women shouldn’t be degraded on their own campuses just for kicks, I guess!  It’s tremendously entertaining–and sexy!–to watch images of people who must resort to sex work in order to pay the bills.  What was I thinking?  I know, I know–that’s what women–especially poor women–are for!  I keep forgetting.  And let’s not also forget:  women have no expectation of safety or bodily integrity on most campuses, so why cry about a little spank movie?  Clearly, I have no sense of perspective.  May I offer you a HandiWipe? Continue Reading »

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UPDATED BELOW

Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing from Britain to his publisher in 1855:

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash–and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.  What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?–worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.

David Starkey, speaking in Britain in 2009 about the launch of a TV show based on his biography of Henry VIII (h/t to reader S.C.):

In an interview with the Radio Times, out today, Dr Starkey said: “One of the great problems has been that Henry, in a sense, has been absorbed by his wives. Which is bizarre.

“But it’s what you expect from feminised history, the fact that so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience. Unhappy marriages are big box office.” Continue Reading »

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The University of Michigan Press is going all-digital, baby.  Does this make you more or less likely to seek out UMP as a publisher?  I get the economic argument–but what kind of history authors in particular is this move going to attract?  Given how status-conscious publishers are–and how relatively sought-after historians are after they’ve published a book already–I just don’t see too many second- or third-time authors agreeing to have their books published digitally.

Speaking as a reader–I spend enough time in front of glowing screens as it is.  I’ve consulted some on-line books close to my own research, but I can’t say that I’ve “read” them.  And, having a shelf of ”books” printed out from the internets–that just sounds messy and unappealing.

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Ruth Mazo Karras returns today to answer some of the questions left in the comments to her previous post about publishing in Gender and History, whose North American headquarters have recently moved to the History Department at the University of Minnesota.  Ruth is a distinguished medieval European historian who serves as one of three North American co-editors of Gender and History, along with Sarah Chambers (colonial Latin America) and Regina Kunzel (U.S. History).  Today she answers your questions and dishes some more:  about choosing the right venue for your work, and how to list articles not yet published on your C.V. with greater precision.

Thanks for all your kind comments on my post about publishing in Gender and History.  I’m glad some of you found it useful advice for publishing in humanities journals in general, too.

Magistra wanted to know whether G & H has any statistics on how often different articles are read.  We do have stats on frequency of downloads.  Unfortunately I only have hardcopy, it’s in my office, and we’re on break.  I can tell you that there aren’t any medieval articles in the top 10.  There is one early American article near the top of the list that sticks in my mind:  Toby Ditz, “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power:  Some Remedies from Early American Gender History.”  Many of the most frequently downloaded articles are like Ditz’s in that they are very methodologically or theoretically oriented; the ones that focus more closely on research findings don’t appeal to as wide an audience, although that doesn’t mean we don’t publish them.

I agree with Bennett that it is important for scholars working on earlier periods to be part of the conversation in women’s and gender history (and history of sexuality, which strict Foucauldian constructionists will tell you didn’t exist before modernity).  True story:  when I became president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, I had a long-time member tell me Continue Reading »

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Today, we’ve got a special guest blogger, Ruth Mazo Karras, who is writing in her capacity as one of the new North American co-editors of Gender and History.  Many of you may know her because of her record as a leading medieval European historian and historian of gender and sexuality for more than two decades.  She is the author of Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (1988), Common Women:  Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (1996), From Boys to Men:  Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (2003), Sexuality in Medieval Europe:  Doing Unto Others (2005), and most recently, Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, co-edited with Joel Kaye and E. Ann Matter (2008).  She wants all of you women’s and gender historians and historians of sexuality to submit your articles for consideration, and in this post, she walks you through Gender and History’s editorial process.  My guess is that those of you who are new to academia will find it an extremely useful overview of how to get a journal article published.  I’m not so new myself, but I always find it helpful to know what I can expect from a journal, so there may be something here to tempt even you world-weary old pros.

Please submit your comments and questions in the thread below–Ruth has promised to read them over and respond to them in a separate post next week, but we can also use the thread to talk over your issues, problems, and advice regarding academic publication, especially in journals.  I think it’s wonderful that Ruth is interested in doing some guest posts here on behalf of G & H–and I hope that many of you will be encouraged to send something in.

Particularly because the discussion of Judith Bennett’s History Matters here earlier this week and at Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar last week drew many comments from people who work in earlier periods, I asked Historiann if I could put in a plug for a journal that is definitely not afraid of the distant past:  Gender & History.   I’d like to encourage all you historians of women, gender, and/or sexuality-or scholars in other fields who do historical work-to consider submitting your work to G & H.  As we say on the web site:  “Spanning epochs and continents, Gender & History examines changing conceptions of gender, and maps the dialogue between femininities, masculinitiesand their historical contexts.  The journal publishes rigorous and readable articles both on particular episodes in gender history and on broader methodological questions which have ramifications for the discipline as a whole.” 

G & H has a slightly different structure than many journals.  It is published by Wiley-Blackwell in Oxford and has two separate editorial offices, one in North America and one in the UK.  All book reviews are handled through the UK office.  The current UK co-editors are Karen Adler and Ross Balzaretti of the University of Nottingham.  You can submit articles to either editorial office; it doesn’t matter where you yourself are located.   Sarah Chambers, Regina Kunzel, and I, at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, became the North American co-editors in September 2008.  My field is medieval Europe; Sarah’s is colonial Latin America; and Regina’s is 20^th century U.S. 

I’ll try to answer here a few of the questions you may have about journal publication in general, and this journal in particular.  If you have further questions, please post them in the comments, and Historiann has promised to let me do another guest post in a few days to respond.  Continue Reading »

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It's. . . The Bishop!

Go read Prof. Zero’s “A Heretical Post,” subtitled, “writing is fun, and publishing is easy.”  Here’s a sample:

The book I am reading now has one of those prefaces I dislike, that list all the funding, leave time, help, and culinary support the author had. Without all of this they could never have taken the first step toward formulating their book. This kind of preface makes sure we know the writer has an élite lifestyle, and intimates that writing is impossible without that. These prefaces thus perform a gatekeeping speech act: if you are not in my social stratum, you cannot write. But it is not true that one cannot write while also doing one’s own research and cooking, and it is not true that one cannot do one’s own editing.

.          .          .          .        .          .          .          .          .          .          .       

My theory on it was that the life of the mind was fascinating, being a research professional was interesting, teaching was fine, and service/administration was all in a day’s work. I had also noted that fieldwork = adventure travel = fun, and because interacting with other intellectually oriented people = fun.

What I did not expect to encounter was the investment of so many professors in suffering and/or false stoicism, and the common idea that suffering = research. I also did not expect to have to work with the assumption that writing + publishing = pain you must endure for survival’s sake only. Continue Reading »

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