In this episode, we talk with Yale University Press Executive Editor Adina Popescu about what makes her interested in a book manuscript and in an academic author. Our topics include: What the query letter should include; how to approach the conference "book exhibit hall conversation with an editor; what occurs at the mysterious university press "boards" and who is present at those meetings; why and when book manuscripts return to reviewers; why an editor might ask for additional reviews of your manuscript, and how to get the most out of the review process. Adina also talks what has changed the most in publishing and book-reviewing.

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Yale professor Elli Stern talks with us about figuring out what kind of writing we want to do after tenure—and the importance of building a team of friends and colleagues who can read drafts and provide valuable feedback.

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We’re talking with Alia Hanna Habib of the Gernert literary agency about how academics can successfully find agents; what’s the best way to write a cold-call query letter to agents; how an academic author can include her own intellectual history in the book proposal; avoiding the “voice from nowhere” style of writing; how much money is reasonable to expect as a first-time trade press author; and what to expect from an agent. We also discuss how book deals differ from their cinematic portrayals, and when an academic might consider trade press publication.

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We’re speaking with Richard Breitman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history at American University about his 45+ year career, and his 12 books. We talked about how research on FDR and the Holocaust spawned many research projects; how convenience and cost affects archival projects; how an agent can helpfully shape a writing project; how journalists can play a useful role in disseminating academic research; how even successful co-authoring has its rough patches; and getting past the “Hasn’t that been done before?” challenge to a book idea.

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We’re talking with Helen Sword, emeritus professor at the University of Auckland, and founder of the writing community, the WriteSPACE. She is also the author of several books about academic writing, including Writing With Pleasure (Princeton, 2023); Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard, 2017), The Writers Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (Chicago, 2016), and Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard, 2012). We talk about what Helen has learned about academic writing through her research and by working with academic writers in groups and one-on-one.

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We’re talking with film historian Noah Isenberg, the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor and former Chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin. Isenberg is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Legend and Afterlife of Hollywood’s most Beloved Movie, and several other books about film. We talk about why and when we might drop theory from our writing; finding a literary agent; the excitement of finding your audience and readers through community events; making the most of our research through multiple publications; the backlash and stigma academics can face when they “go popular,” and how academics help academic presses by writing more accessible books.

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We’re speaking with founding and current editors of In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, about what it means to establish a new journal. Founded in 2015, In Geveb partook in the decade's ethos of disruption in technology by seeking to reimagine the academic journal. Aspiring to be the “N+1 of Yiddish studies, the journal is completely online, and contains sections on pedagogy and translation, as well as a blog, and has remained accessible to readers outside of the academy. Our guests, Jessica Kirzane, Saul Noam Zaritt, Sarah Zarrow, and Dalia Wolfson, tell us about the skills and knowledge they acquired about things ranging from fundraising and the financial side of a journal, to managing others and cultivating a collaborative and supportive working environment. We also talk about what working on the journal has allowed them to do in their professional lives, that had not been possible, otherwise.

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With the support of the University of Florida Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, we’re talking with history professor, we’re talking with history professor Raphael Folsom (Oklahoma), who wrote the book, How to Get Grant Money in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Yale University Press) about why it’s important to think big for grant writing; recommendation-letter writing; being encouraged by our failures; why it does make sense to be a giver in academia; and the good energy that comes from supporting others.

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We’re speaking with novelist and academic Elizabeth Graver about writing about her Sephardic family’s history as fiction, even as she incorporated facts and archival finds. Graver also talks about maintaining a creative process, alongside her academic position, and about moving between fiction and non-fiction genres.

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We’re speaking with UConn Associate Professor of History Andy Horowitz, who also serves as the Connecticut State Historian. We talk about Andy’s first book, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020) which won a 2021 Bancroft Prize in American History, and was named the 2021 Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and a 2020 Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He has also written for The Atlantic, Time, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times.

We talk about what it means to write about disasters and about the place where you live; writing about people who are currently alive; being a presentist historian; and what it means to write “important books.”

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