Historians and Books vs. Journal Articles

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Chris Beneke, a contributor to RiAH, has written an interesting piece on history publishing and gauging scholarly output. (I just posted it at the HS blog.) Beneke zeroes in on the significance of book publishing vs journal publishing and asks some questions about how historians could or should measure the weight of their work.

Chris Beneke, "The Journal Standard," The Historical Society, November 15, 2010

Historians are people of the book. We write piles of them—monographs, textbooks, and edited books, strictly academic books and books intended (usually with no foundation in reality) for the bestseller list. Some of our better books are histories of the book; some of our better historians are historians of the book. We cherish books dearly, not least for their narrative artistry. But we also value their utility within the academic world. At research universities and colleges with research aspirations, after all, the scholarly book serves as the elusive ticket to the vastly overrated world of the tenured, Associate Professor, and later to invitations to speak, comment, and publish still more books. . . .

In short, historians are producing, recognizing, and even celebrating work that runs sharply against the grain of research in other disciplines. To put it in the bluntest terms, we have a Book Standard; they have a Journal Standard. It’s not that we don’t value that other form of scholarly currency. We just don’t value it quite as much.>>>

On Illness Stories and Hospital Beds

Art Remillard

I’m blogging from a bed. It's supposed to look like a hospital bed. More on that later. For now, let’s talk about stories.

Whenever I do research, I’m not looking for sources. I’m looking for stories. Sometimes I find fragments of stories in letters and diaries. Other times I find more detailed stories in memoirs and autobiographies. In any case, since I write religious histories, I want stories that convey a certain essence—something that is reflective, insightful, unique, aesthetically compelling—something that gets to the heart of an issue, event, or idea.

But even when I do find that gem of a story, I worry that I’m just not getting everything. Recall Mike Pasquier’s post on this very point as it related to Hurricane Katrina. “The circumstances just seem too aberrant, too disjointed from ordinary time and space, to capture the religious experiences of the moment,” he laments. “Scholars of religious studies, myself included, tend to use phrases like ‘lived religion’ and ‘extraliturgical religion’ to describe religion outside the carefully scripted confines of ‘official religion’ or ‘institutional religion.’ But these categories seem only to get at the before and after the storm; the now remains elusive.”

Stories of the storm, filtered through memory, will always cast a veil of mystery. Is it even possible, I wonder, to find a “now” perspective? Probably not. But illness stories might come close. In At the Will of the Body, medical sociologist Arthur Frank chronicles his journey through two illnesses, a heart attack and cancer. Religion and storytelling play no small role in his account.

Stories we tell ourselves about what is happening to us are dangerous because they are powerful. Stories come to us from many sources: some we seek, many happen without our notice, others impose themselves on our lives. We have to choose carefully which stories to live with, which to use to answer the question of what is happening to us. Jacob’s wrestling became a story I lived with as part of my personal mythology of illness. This is what it is to be ill: to wrestle through the long night, injured, and if you prevail until the sun rises, to receive a blessing. Through Jacob’s story, illness became an adventure.

Frank elaborates on the significance of stories and spirituality in The Wounded Storyteller and The Renewal of Generosity. He emphasizes how a diagnosis wounds both a person's body and identity. Reconstructing both calls for a new story, one that accounts for the illness and all of its implications. Caregivers can play a significant role in this process, if they are truly caregivers. “I reserve the name ‘caregiver’ for the people who are willing to listen to ill persons and respond to their individual experiences,” he explains in At the Will of the Body.

Is Frank’s illness story—and others like it—“now” enough? “Cancer never disappears,” he affirms. Frank will always live with his illness, and tell his illness story. And this story's religious dimension might influence readers too. As Martin Marty put it in his review, “this short work can transform lives or at least ways of thinking about living.”

This brings me to my faux-hospital bed. It’s Relay for Life time at St. Francis University. Students from my “Narrative Medicine” course decided to set up 3 hospital beds, with 3 volunteers acting as cancer patients for 24 hours. Somehow, I ended up being one of the patients. I've assumed the identity of a 40-year-old brain cancer patient. I'm married, with two kids. I’m also angry, depressed, disoriented, and enveloped in pain. My motor skills are such that the “nurses” have to feed me.

So I have a story. It's a story of humility, mainly. I've ceded my freedom to move, sleep, and eat. It's nothing like the real thing, but maybe I'll leave with an improved sense of empathy. After all, throughout the day and night, survivors have stopped to share their illness stories. The depth and detail has been nothing short of astonishing. Every story resonates with spiritual force, causing me to reflect on the limits of life, and the reality of death.

I'm almost finished now. I have crossed over in to another identity, as well as another discipline, and will be resuming "normalcy" soon. I will bring back new insights. In particular, maybe on my next trip to the archives, I'll pay closer attention to stories of illness. They seem to make the “now” a bit less elusive.

Know Your Editor: An Interview with Elaine Maisner

Randall Stephens

Over six years ago William Germano wrote a savagely witty essay in the Chronicle titled “If Dissertations Could Talk, What Would They Say?” They would whimper, perhaps. Or, they would drone on about things that few cared about. “Why are dissertations, the firstborn of the academic tribe, so dull?” he asked pointedly. “What does it mean when the best minds can create book-length work that commands so little interest? The answer, as we all know, is that dullness is safe. . . . A real book manuscript doesn't look over its shoulder, worrying that Foucault is running after it in a hockey mask."

I read this piece as I was finishing up my dissertation. The article, frankly, scared the living daylights out of me. What if my dissertation sucked, as they say? What if it was as readable as a phonebook, or, worse, as readable as a higher math dissertation? Could I put the “fun” into fundamentalism and could I unleash all that was pent-up in Pentecostalism? Or would my writing style and laborious arguments drain whatever life there was out of those vital religious movements?

I think history and religious studies scholars who are now finishing their dissertations still have some of those questions hanging over their heads like so many dark clouds or daggers. I’ve always been interested in hearing what editors have to say about the matter. Trade and university press editors often work with first-time authors and they are well acquainted with the challenges freshly minted PhDs face. (See Paul's post below on NYU Press's terrific new series.)

To get an editor’s take on publishing and converting that dissertation to a book, I interviewed Elaine Maisner (Senior Editor, University of North Carolina Press) a couple weeks back at the AAR meeting in Montréal. Maisner focuses on religious studies, Latin American and Caribbean studies, and regional trade books. (She offered great advice on academic publishing some years back in an article for Perspectives: “Getting Published by a University Press.”)

Here I ask her about readership and proposals, and I talk with her about some UNC books in American religious history that she thinks worked quite well.

I hope to do one or two similar interviews with an editor(s) at the AHA. Let me know if you have any suggestions regarding whom I should contact, or questions that you think I should pose.

Historical Society's 2010 Conference & Religious History

Randall Stephens

[Crossposted at the Historical Society Blog]

The Historical Society's 2010 conference will deal with the future of the field of history. Titled "Historical Inquiry in the New Century" (June 3-5, 2010, hosted by Eric Arnesen at George Washington University, Washington, DC) the meeting hopes to attract scholars interested in the shape of the historical enterprise.

Animating questions include:

• What are the current historiographical debates?
• Where do particular fields currently stand?
• What's changed for the good—or the worse—in specific areas?
• What have been the clearest criticisms of the profession?
• What are the truly "big questions" historians face, and are we adequately grappling with them?
• What, in fact, are our aims/goals for the history that we write? What are the audiences for the history we write? Who's reading us?
• What impact, if any, do we have on larger, non-scholarly debates and understandings?
• How important is good writing to the field of history?
  

I hope that we can have several panels on religious history in general and American religious history in particular. Questions similar to those above might be worth considering. In addition, though, participants might look at how the field of religious history has broadened out over the decades from institutional and denominational history to something much larger. In recent years the number of historians who study religion has grown rapidly. Will that help reshape the field of history? Are the arguments about the neglect of religious history—made by George Marsden, John McGreevy, and Jon Butler—still applicable? Other questions to consider: What topics are younger historians studying, and why? What role does theory play in the writing of religious history? Has the job market or the publishing industry begun to reflect the growth in religious history?

A couple of years back James O’Toole wrote an essay in Historically Speaking on “Religious History in the Post-Ahlstrom Era.” His closing paragraph deserves further reflection:

The post-Ahlstrom era is now thirty years old, and no one can predict how long it might last. Historians will have to take account of new forms of religious diversity, particularly outside the West, both on their own terms and for the impact they have on more established groups. Levels of religious practice remain very high in America in comparison to other parts of the West, and history can help us understand this phenomenon. The future of the discipline is unknown, but it is clear that there is much work to do.

Please contact me, or the Historical Society, if you are interested in giving a paper, attending, offering insights, or putting together a session. Proposals (abstract and CV) should be sent to jslucas [at] bu.edu by January 31, 2010. Panel proposals are encouraged.

New Group Blog

Randall Stephens

I've just launched the Historical Society group blog. It will feature short entries and reviews by and interviews with a variety of leading historians. Content will range from ancient to modern history, cultural to political history, and all points in between. We will highlight material in THS's two publications: Historically Speaking and the Journal of the Historical Society. Regional and national conferences will be announced along with news of Historical Society-sponsored lectures. Posts are forthcoming on THS's 2010 Washington, D.C. conference, organized by Eric Arnesen.

American religious history will be a prominent theme. (Though, Religion in American History will still be your one-stop shop for all things American-religious-history related.)

Our first post comes from Heather Cox Richardson, UMass, Amherst. This is her first entry from her guide for history majors.

More Whales, Less Fleas?

Randall J. Stephens

We recently published a forum in Historically Speaking on the differences between academic and popular history: "Do You Need a License to Practice History?" Adam Hochschild's lead essay is a wonderful piece, filled with insight into the profession and the audience historians do and do not reach. Donald Yerxa gathered a stellar cast of authors to comment on Hochschild's remarks. Here's Hochschild:

“To produce a mighty book,” Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “you must
choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” Too often, the pressures in the academic world train historians in writing books about fleas, rather than in trying to harpoon a whale.

I've posted a few of the responses--by Joyce Seltzer, John Demos, and Joseph J. Ellis--in addition to Hochschild's essay on the Historically Speaking web site. Food for thought.

Could some of the same arguments and counterarguments be made concerning American religious history? Is their a significant difference between historians like Robert Orsi, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Marie Griffith on one hand and Gary Wills, Diana L. Eck, and Stephen Prothero on the other? What sort of readers do historians of American religion write for? Who should they write for?