Securing Opportunities to Write

I recently had a lengthy and negative review essay published about a book that has, publicly, been received with acclaim in Medieval Studies but privately (and more in Jewish and Islamic Studies than English lit) been critiqued. The over the top enthusiasm for the book and the rush to treat it not as the first word but the last one on the subject, as a foundational text that must be accepted in whole moving forward, is what led me to treat the book in such detail. I knew that anything less would have no impact. (The review is available through OA at the journal’s web site through the end of the year, and a PDF is available on my academia page for after that.)

I knew that I was opening myself up to a lot of criticism, and I anticipated quite a bit of it exactly. I wasn’t surprised, for example, by people announcing that they were refusing to read it on the grounds that it’s racist for a white woman to critique a book on race written by a woman of color. I knew that was coming. Honestly, I also expected to take some flak for how I cited Peter Abelard, or for citing him at all since some scholars consider him to have been a rapist; and I was pleasantly surprised not to have that come my way. 

What I didn’t expect were suggestions that as a white woman I had been handed an opportunity in the form of being allowed to write a review essay at all where a woman of color wouldn’t have been. I cannot deny the reality behind the charge: Many opportunities do go to white scholars that could just as easily and even should go to scholars of color.  But I was still surprised because I don’t see this as an opportunity that was handed to me at all. In other words, it absolutely could have happened like that, but in this case it didn’t.

So without denying that I benefit professionally from white privilege, I thought it might also be helpful to walk through some of the steps I took to pursue this publication and a related, recent one . Academic publishing is not at all transparent; and at the beginning of my career I definitely didn’t know what I was doing or even how to figure out what I was doing in the arena of journal publications. 

 There are things I can do and try my best to do about systemic racism and there are things I can do about other problems in academic publishing that sit atop those structures. This blog post is meant to address the latter; it’s about the smaller, immediate, concrete issue rather than the much bigger one.

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The main reason I decided to write a full review of The Invention of Race is because it was being portrayed as the first and last word on race for the European Middle Ages and its methodologies inviolable. No book should have that status, and in this one in particular doesn’t really work for Europe outside of England or for thinking about religious minorities and the ways in which they were racialized. But I also went ahead with it because I had made some very critical comments about the book publicly — including on Twitter — and felt that I had an obligation to back up my 280-character barbs. To write a review like this is a huge investment of time in the book itself, and something one only does for a work that is important, if flawed.

(This latter part of the backstory made it that much more surprising to me that one of the lines of criticism adopted against my review was that since I hadn’t reviewed it on Goodreads when I entered it with a single star into my very idiosyncratic and arbitrarily-updated personal catalogue there, that because I hadn’t reviewed it immediately upon disliking it and instead took the time to sit with and engage with it, I ought to have been disqualified from reviewing the book for publication.)

Without knowing where, if anywhere, the review might end up, I drafted a first version: five or six pages that enumerated my conclusions and contextualized them within my observations about the state of the field. I pitched it first to the Jewish Review of Books. The editor was interested but thought that I hadn’t developed my argument well enough: I was providing my conclusions without sharing their foundations with the readers. I also pitched to Public Seminar, housed at the New School, but  never received a response beyond acknowledgement of receipt. That was when I stopped to re-evaluate. Working with a developmental editor I trust, I realized that this could not be a shorter piece aimed a crossover (academic but also interested, educated lay) audience, but instead needed to be written for an academic journal, with the space it could afford me and the many functionalities of footnotes.

Before putting in any additional work, I approached the editor of Medieval Encounters, the journal that would eventually become the home for the piece. The editor is someone I have known since I was in college and I knew from talking with him that part of his vision for the journal was to foster different kinds of academic writing beyond the traditional article form.  Part of the publishing process is figuring out which journals and which editors have attitudes about academic writing that are aligned with your goals as a scholar and writer. I described to him what I wanted to do and asked if, in principle, that’s something that the journal might consider; he said yes. I wrote and I submitted it to the journal after asking many colleagues I trust to read and comment; I continued to seek out opinions I value throughout the editorial process.

(Pausing to reflect, I am reminded that I did something similar once before:  I had an article that wasn’t going to be a good fit for a conventional journal, and so I reached out to the two then-editors of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies to ask whether they might be amenable to publishing a piece on storytelling and the Alexander Romance written in the style of Writing Without Footnotes. They consulted with their editorial board and agreed that they would at least be willing to consider such a submission. In the end I didn’t follow through, but the point is that it’s possible to do even as a junior scholar.)

For the Invention of Race review,  is true that I was able to do this more easily because I already knew the editor; and yes, white supremacy is implicated in our very networks of contacts and most important is to change that. But within this deeply imperfect world there  is still room to approach journal editors. You don’t have to wait to be asked to write a book review. You don’t have to wait to do something non-traditional or limit yourself to fringe outlets or blogs for articles that depart from some of the norms of academic writing. You can approach an editor cold (unappealing, I know) or, better, ask a more senior colleague , a mentor, or a friend for an introduction to editors they know. The right people are somewhere in your extended network. 

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I see the review essay on The Invention of Race as part of a pair of publications  of mine that came out this year; the other is a chapter in an edited volume, Far Right Revisionism and the End of History. Both of chapters are historiographic studies of politically-inflected contemporary writing of medieval Jewish history that ultimately aren’t about medieval Jewish history at all.

When I finished reading what would become the subject of that piece, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, I wrote a blog post about it, and some time after received an email invitation to turn it into something more academic in nature for this book.

In this case, yes, I was approached. But the approach was made by someone I had never met on the specific basis of preliminary work I had already done. I was offered an opportunity here that I did not seek out myself, but it came because I had laid the groundwork for it; and now that I know the editor a little bit, I am reasonably confident that he did not reach out to me because I’m a white woman. 

The takeaway from this example is that doing and sharing informal writing can lead to opportunities for more formal writing with much wider (and more traditional, if that’s of interest to you) reach. It’s not going to be the right option for everyone. Being a woman on the internet isn’t a picnic and it’s well known that women, ECRs, and scholars of color face more potential consequences in sharing this kind of writing. But it’s one possibility, and one that many scholars on Twitter and elsewhere on the web already do to some degree or another and might wish to leverage into more formal writing opportunities. 

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I imagine that not all readers will agree with my characterization of how my privilege factored into the production of these two publications, and that’s of course fine. But I hope that this post will still be of some use in laying out two paths to publications that I took recently so that younger scholars who may not feel as confident in the publishing process can know a bit more about what the options are and what some of the avenues look like. 

With all of this said, I recently did have a writing opportunity handed to me, one that I’m very excited about and that I accepted without a second thought (while also suggesting the name of a younger colleague, a scholar of color, who might also benefit from the same opportunity in a few years’ time). It came about because of my publishing record and because of which very senior scholars have read my work. So it’s not to say I did nothing to earn or deserve it, but I didn’t do anything specific to pursue it or make it happen for myself. (That is to say that I didn’t, as in the case of The Myth of the Myth, do any specific, informal work to set the stage beyond doing my own thing in my career.)  In this case it’s absolutely fair to describe this as an opportunity I was simply given. I’m not ready to talk about it publicly until the details are a little bit more firmed up, but in the same spirit, I’m happy to write/speak openly and transparently in the future about what that process looks likes and  to reflect upon what it does mean to be sought out or offered an opportunity in our current moment.