From Dissertation to First Book: A Practical Guide
An event within the Intellectual Publics series, convened by Ken Wissoker
Opening Remarks by Louise Lennihan, Provost and Senior Vice President at The Graduate Center, CUNY
April 11, 2016
6:30pm
William P. Kelly Skylight Room
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Please join Intellectual Publics on April 11, 2016 for From Dissertation to First Book: A Practical Guide
Ken Wissoker, Editorial Director of Duke University Press and Director of the Intellectual Publics program at The Graduate Center, CUNY will discuss the process of turning a Ph.D. dissertation into a first book.
He will share advice and expertise around the system of academic publishing with a focus on questions of genre and audience. All are welcome.
KEN WISSOKER is the Editorial Director of Duke University Press, acquiring books in anthropology, cultural studies and social theory; globalization and post-colonial theory; Asian, African, and American studies; music, film and television; race, gender and sexuality; science studies; and other areas in the humanities, social sciences, media, and the arts. He joined the Press as an Acquisitions Editor in 1991; became Editor-in-Chief in 1997; and was named Editorial Director in 2005. In addition to his duties at the Press, he serves as Director of Intellectual Publics at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City. He has published close to 900 books which have won over 100 prizes. Among the authors whose books he has published are Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Charles Taylor, Joan Scott, Lisa Lowe, Lauren Berlant, Brian Massumi, Arjun Appadurai, Sara Ahmed, Rey Chow, Randy Weston, and Fred Wesley. Wissoker is the author of the Cinema Journal essay “The Future of the Book as a Media Project and the earlier Chronicle of Higher Educationarticles “Scholarly Monographs Are Flourishing, Not Dying” and “Negotiating a Passage between Disciplinary Borders” the latter of which was later reprinted with responses from five social scientists in the Social Science Research Council newsletter, Items and Issues. A three-part interview with him by Adeline Koh appeared in April 2013 on the Prof. Hacker blog.
Intellectual Publics provides a multi-faceted forum for cutting-edge scholarship across the humanities and social sciences as well as advice on how to best articulate and publish such work. We present the ideas and approaches that engage the most visionary thinkers of our time through talks and conversations for an audience invested in the ideas themselves. Intellectual Publics brings together an audience that includes faculty and students from CUNY and beyond, as well as artists, writers, and scholars from outside the academy. While speakers include stellar theorists actively shaping their fields, the questions, ideas, and approaches are the main attraction.
Intellectual Publics brings that same creative focus to book publishing, a way of writing for an audience invested in the ideas and methodologies, not just the objects of study themselves. Directed by Ken Wissoker, who is also Editorial Director at Duke University Press, Intellectual Publics offers the Graduate Center and CUNY guidance for scholars — from graduate students to senior faculty — on writing and publishing their work. Both components of Intellectual Publics assume there are thinkers, writers, and readers engaged in ideas beyond those limited to academic niches or to the larger media’s sense of what will appeal to the general public. Intellectual Publics looks to reconstitute the intellectual landscape through promoting those alternatives.
