IHC Co-sponsored talk: William Germano, Writing Beyond the Dissertation: The Obligation to Structure

Tuesday September 28th
4:00 p.m.,
McCune Conference Room

If you’re finishing your Ph.D. thesis or have just earned your degree, you’ve probably been told that you should make plans to publish. But the dissertation is written for a committee and a book for the world. Revising a dissertation is fundamentally adapting from one genre of writing into another. Fundamental to the creation of a publishable scholarly manuscript is a clear understanding of what counts as structure. This talk will explore the ways in which even the mere structure of a scholar’s book-length manuscript affects a publisher’s reaction to that project. How can a writer encase and convey ideas most effectively? What structures encourage an editor? Which will almost guarantee rejection? This talk is intended both for advanced graduate students and for professors at all levels interested in publishing book-length projects.

William Germano is vice-president and publishing director at Routledge, where he has worked since 1986. Prior to that he was editor-in-chief at Columbia University Press.

He received his B.A. from Columbia and his Ph.D. in English from Indiana. Among the authors he has published: Cornel West, Judith Butler, Stephen Greenblatt, Martin Jay, Donna Haraway, Paul de Man, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, James Elkins, Diana Fuss, Dario Fo, Sander Gilman, David Bordwell, Jacques Derrida, Marjorie Garber, Theodor Adorno, Michael Taussig, Jack Zipes, bell hooks, Stephen Orgel, Slavoj _i_ek, Julia Kristeva, Sacvan Bercovitch, John Winkler, Fredric Jameson, David Halperin, Kate Bornstein, and Gilles Deleuze.

In addition to essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education and other journals, he has written Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (Chicago, 2001) and From Dissertation to Book, due from Chicago in early 2005.

He lives in New York City.

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