Scholarship and Writing As the Semester Draws To An End
Today I received the final page proofs of my forthcoming article in Isis. It looks spectacular, I must admit. This is the first article I’ve published that contains images: there are three photographs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century French journal, the Magasin Encyclopedique. I’m also very happy to be associated with Isis. I began my academic career as a graduate student in a history of science program, but then left that program to complete my Ph.D. in intellectual history. I never let go of my interest in the early modern sciences, however, and my dissertation and continuing book project deal with the intellectual influence of the sciences on public policy and politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
With this article out of the way and the semester of teaching nearly over, I should have a little time to devote myself to scholarly projects. I’m submitting a proposal to deliver a paper at the 2009 meeting of the Society for the Study of French History in Dublin. The paper examines the interesting connection between antislavery activism and education reform in the writing of the French philosophe and revolutionary Condorcet. This is also my next article project. Ultimately this subject is being withdrawn from my book manuscript as it currently exists in order to work as a standalone writing project.
My biggest project remains the book. My readers at the University of Rochester Press gave the manuscript very positive reviews, but ultimately decided against immediate publication in favor of suggesting extensive revision. In fact, I am taking the advice of one of the readers and recasting the manuscript significantly in order better to take advantage of my skills and inclinations as a writer. This will involve a change in the title of the book, a refocus of the subject, a complete rewriting of the introduction, and the removal of chapter five (which will become the article on Condorcet mentioned above). I suspect I will not be able to complete these revisions until late summer. So it goes.
I should also take an opportunity to congratulate my wife, who just had her own book manuscript accepted for publication at Palgrave Macmillan. Hurrah!
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