Publishing Advice for Liberal Arts College Faculty

This is a guest post by Erich Hatala Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Director of the Frost Center for the Environment at Wellesley College.

His first book, Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies is now out with Oxford University Press.

One of the draws of being a professor at a liberal arts college is that you often have the opportunity to teach a wide range of courses. In my nine years at Wellesley College, I’ve taught 10 different courses ranging from philosophy of art to environmental ethics, and including advanced seminars on topics such as authenticity, public philosophy, and cultural heritage. This variety in teaching can also spur a similar diversity in your research. Rather than trying to become the world expert in a very niche topic, you can be a research omnivore, publishing on a broad range of issues.[1]

I’ve published papers on topics that careen from food waste to love, and from cultural appropriation to landscape art. But publishing on a broad range of research topics isn’t necessarily well-served by submitting your work to the most exclusive generalist journals and playing the odds. I’ve seen folks in the blogosphere recommend always having five(+) papers under review at a time, but that has never been for me, in part because I’ve never had close to that many unpublished papers in existence at the same time.

The truth is, research is not my favorite part of the job. You might look at my publication list and think that I write a lot, but it would be more accurate to say that I write efficiently and strategically: with one or two exceptions, I’ve published all the philosophical work that I’ve written. Keeping all of that in mind, I’ve outlined some publication strategies I found useful while I was on the tenure track at a liberal arts college with fairly demanding research standards for tenure. As always, your mileage may vary, and I’ve gotten lucky many times. But I think these are at least useful strategies to consider trying out.

1. Keep your research in dialogue with your teaching.

Students are a fantastic source of philosophical inspiration. I didn’t have any particular plans to write about cultural appropriation early in my career, but my first year at Wellesley I taught a little unit on the topic in my philosophy of art course: my students were deeply dissatisfied with the existing literature. So, I wrote a paper that tried to speak to some of their concerns. It’s my most cited paper by a factor of about 6. I also put a lot of brand-new papers on my reading lists each time I teach a course. That way, what I’m engaging with in the classroom is simultaneously keeping me up to date with the literature for research purposes. I’ve also learned a lot from getting feedback on work in progress from my students.

2. Read, think, and write outside the box

As indicated by my teaching interests, I like to read widely, both within and beyond philosophy. In my experience, thinking across literatures is helpful when it comes to publication. It can be really tough to get a paper published when you’re trying to make a small move in a pre-established debate. But bringing different literatures into dialogue with each other can make papers novel and exciting in ways that reviewers respond to positively (not every reviewer, of course, but enough). Building bridges across literatures also keeps me excited about the project, which is an essential element in getting any writing done in the first place.

3. Submit to conferences that are attached to publications.

Some of these are annual (such as the Workshop in Normative Ethics, which generally leads to publication in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics), but others are one-off, and might be linked with a special issue of a journal or an essay collection. I’ve published three papers this way, and found it very useful because you receive a lot of feedback (you have to submit to the conference, you get feedback at the conference, you get editorial feedback from the convener/editor, and, typically, some anonymous peer review as well).

These calls also have the virtue of hard deadlines (which I find useful for getting me to write) as well as intriguing topics. Sometimes you might have a paper idea that fits the conference theme, and sometimes the theme might inspire a new paper. Especially if the conference only requires a long abstract for submission, this is a low investment/high reward strategy. (NB: I’ve seen some people on the blogs/social media dismiss these kinds of publications as “less than” but I think this attitude stems from some sorely misplaced values. When the chips are down, no one but a snob cares if a paper was part of a “special issue” or not).

4. Look for opportunities to turn conference comments into publications.

Providing quality comments at a conference involves considerable work: don’t throw it away. I owe this advice to Meena Krishnamurthy. I gave comments on one of her papers when I was early on the TT, and she suggested that I submit them for publication (this had certainly not occurred to me). The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy publishes short response papers, so I gave the comments a quick polish and sent them off. That’s now a little publication for very little extra labor. Obviously not all conference comments will be suitable for a journal, but I have two papers that started this way.

5. Don’t wait to be invited.

People hold authoring an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in fairly high regard, and it’s true that they often invite authors to contribute. But many people don’t realize that you can also pitch them. That’s what I did. I also pitched a paper to Philosophy Compass that was ultimately published. Both of these essays went through anonymized peer review, but it’s different from cold-submitting to a journal, because you know that the editor is already interested in the work. Point is, sometimes it’s worth just putting yourself out there as a potential author. To quote my dad, the worst they can say is “no.” (That’s not really the worst they can say, but I’ve always liked the spirit of this advice nevertheless).

6. Give a talk once, then write it up and send it off.

I have a hard time giving a fluent talk if I’ve already written the whole paper (I get too focused on capturing exactly what I wrote rather than presenting the ideas in a way that is most easily digestible in auditory form). I prefer to talk from notes, get feedback, and then write it up. This is of course easiest to do if you have the privilege of giving an invited talk on whatever you want, but also be on the lookout for conferences that only require abstracts or long abstracts. Talks are also handy because (again) they supply hard deadlines. I am by no means an in-demand speaker, but even a couple opportunities to give talks can result in a couple papers. I believe three of my publications had this kind of one-and-done structure: talk, write, submit. Of course, it matters where you’re submitting. This is unlikely to pan out if you’re shooting for the moon every time. Think about what venue might be a good fit for your particular essay, not just what journal is the shiniest. There are a lot of well-regarded journals out there.   

As a result of using these strategies while on the tenure track, when I was writing a paper, I often had some sense of a publication venue that the paper was headed towards. That can deliver a welcome sense of direction and optimism to the publication game. Very early in my career, I did have a paper or two that I sent bouncing from one desk rejection at a fancy journal to the next. I found this demoralizing. So, I stopped doing it! I’m now at a career stage where I have the privilege of not cold-submitting to journals at all. But I realize in retrospect that the strategies I describe in this post helped move me in that direction even while I was still under publishing pressure for tenure. I hope that some of you will find a few of these strategies useful, too.

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[1] Unless your tenure and promotion committee tells you otherwise. Always, always ask your committee what their expectations are: that supplants any general advice I offer here.

Comments

[Erich Hatala Matthes]

I'm also happy to answer questions if anyone has any!

[Alex Bryant]

Hi Erich,
Thanks for this, these are really helpful. Quick question about conference comments.
Say the paper you wrote the comments for hasn't been published (yet, or at all)--how do you imagine proceeding? I imagine it's right to acknowledge the origin of your work on the topic (e.g. "This paper began as ..."), but I wonder how much you end-up in a sense giving away the author's paper itself when you publish a paper that engages seriously with work they haven't yet put out.

Just a thought I've been chewing on, I'd be interested to hear what you or anyone else thinks about this.

[Erich Hatala Matthes]

Hi Alex, that's a good question. I think if you're trying to publish comments as a reply, then you're going to be most likely to succeed if the paper you're replying to is at least forthcoming somewhere (I just imagine editors would be disinclined otherwise). If your aim is to develop conference comments into a larger, free-standing piece, then I agree that you should certainly acknowledge the parts that were originally written in reply to a conference paper and the author of the work you're responding to, but I don't think you necessarily need to wait until the original paper is published in that scenario. It probably depends on how much your paper would be developing ideas from the comments vs. getting into the details of this other (at least at this point) unpublished paper. I really don't have a strong sense about this, though. It seems to me similar to when multiple people are sharing drafts of work in progress, and responding to each other in their papers, but who knows in what order those papers might find homes (if at all). Maybe a journal editor will weigh in?