Social revolutionaries in Akatui 1906: all of the women in the first two rows assassinated Tsarist officials
So you doing your MA dissertation, or started on your PhD thesis, or even perhaps just coming up to retirement, and want to do some research into your favourite subject at an academic level. Now you can toil away in the dark for your own interest and, the fruits of your research will never see the light of day, outside of a university archive. However if you want to develop an academic career, get your research noticed, talked about, and even influence other people’s work, then you are going to have to engage with the outside world. The idea of this article is to suggest some ways in which you can do this in the early stages of your career or while still carrying out your research.
The project
Before you start, I would recommend that you sit down and define your main “project”. What would you like to be known for, studying the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, including Emiliano Zapata (as seen on the right), or studying the Contractor State in eighteenth century England, or as in my case, the logistics of the Red Army 1918-1945. It could be your dissertation/thesis subject or just an interest, however it must be a strong and long standing one, since you are going to use this to define your academic ‘persona’. Think Professor Gary Sheffield. He is known as a First World War historian, even though he actually writes about a whole range of military history subjects. So it worth while to sit down and write out a definition of what your main academic interests are, and form them into a coherent narrative.
Training
I find that Academic training is a bit like learning as a Craft Apprentice, you are expected to pick up skills by ‘doing’, especially once you move onto MA level and are expected to self study to a large degree. Even on taught course, you may get a seminar or two on study skills but will be expected to teach yourself the rest from online course or from books such as ‘Succeeding with Your Master’s Dissertation: Step-by-step Handbook, 4th Edition’. So it would be worthwhile, thinking about some of the skills you will need in the future in your particular subject. Do you need to learn to read another language, is map making important in your field to study, do you need to write in a particular style to need the requirements of Oxbridge based journals, or do you need particular skills in archive work abroad? If so, it would be worthwhile to take take the time to find some additional training in these areas and work on these skills so that they are to hand when you need them.
Writing is a key skill for academics so websites such as Helen Sword’s one are a good place to start for some free advice, before you move onto buying books and paying for online or residential courses and there are even some ideas on ‘the writing cycle’ this blog.
A good place for all kinds of academic training is the Institute for Historical Research which offers both online and residential training courses in a wide range of historical skills. Three that I can particularly recommend are the ‘Blogging for historians’ the ‘Historical mapping and Geographical Information Systems (GIS)’ and the week long ‘Methods and sources for historical research’ which is an introduction to using various kinds of archives and libraries, such as the ‘Welcome Institute’, to conduct research. It is a lot of work but hugely useful. They run two courses a year, each one focussed on a different subject, so it is worth planning when you do this course. The IHR runs a ‘History Day’ every year in November, where students can meet archives, historical associations, publishers and institutions. You can find further details here. Also the British Library runs a series of lectures and training sessions for early career academics from post-graduate level upwards which include British Library’s Postgraduate Open Day Programme, Digital Scholarship Training Programme (see Mia Ridge’s explanation here: 101 Introduction to Digital Scholarship) and the Doctoral Research Programme. These are all worth a look.
Blog website
An easy first step that you can do from home is to set up your own blogging website, just like this one. It should be simple to use so that you spend more time blogging than writing code to fix annoying bugs. For that reason, I would recommend Squarespace (this site is based on their platform,) or any of the other ‘out of the box’ platforms for websites, simply so that you spend half an hour setting it up and then get going. Some may prefer WordPress, Drupal or Joomla if they have built websites before, and these may well work out cheaper in the long run, but unless you have experience with them, they can be tricky to maintain. You should keep your history blog, only for writing about your history project, so that you build up links and site traffic that is relevant and not taken off track by your holiday photos. Similarly you need to have a site address that is relevant and so will help with search engine optimisation.
There are a lot of academics on Twitter, and again if properly used, reserving your Twitter account for your historical project, you can gain a lot of contacts through it. When you set up your account, make sure that you put in a description that highlights your project and then start to follow well known historians and groups in your field. Keep to this and start to build up a list of them, see what they are saying and see who they follow to increase your circle of interest. Once you know your way around, see if you can make some intelligent comments on what other historians are saying and build up relationships that way. Ask questions of senior historians and you can often get long threads of questions and answers building up. I did one of these with Mark Harrison at University of Warwick and it ended up in the Financial Times. Add in fellow students but remember that this is a public platform and you are trying to build confidence in your comments, so you need to keep it respectful.
Research groups
Many subjects have research groups or associations. These can vary from small groupings of academics working in the same subject area, such as the Equine History Collective to large organisations that have national and international affiliations. Examples of these include BASEES (British Association of Slavic and Eastern European Studies) and The British Commission for Military History. They may run their own journals, such as British Journal for Military History (BJMH) and have their own conferences such as the BASEES Annual Conference or the Second World War Research Group. They may have separate international groups running regional conferences and events or study groups concentrating on a specialist subject. They are worth joining for the conferences alone as well as the opportunity to meet other scholars in your field.
Libraries, museums and archives
Every British scholar will want to become a member of the British Library and sign up to their website so that they can use their online catalogues of books, journals, theses and sound archives. A visit is well worthwhile and the library has lots of facilities behind the scenes which you can access. There are lots of finding aids such as the ETHOS thesis portal and some material can be ordered online and then delivered to your home, although this is costly.
Its a little known fact that most university libraries are open to independent scholars as well, especially during the summer holidays when the students are away and they are running summer schools. So you can get membership of the Bodleian Library, School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies Library at University of London and many others which might hold special collections in your project area.
Museums such as the RAF Museum and the National Railway Museum are well known for their collections of archival documents that scholars can consult outside of the museum collection. However there are other smaller, less well known museums which hold collections that might be of interest and these may not be so easy to access. For instance the Military Intelligence Museum holds an archive and it also acts as the home for the Mendenmen Association (RAF Photo-reconnaissance Association) archive. The problem is that the museum is housed on the Army base at Chicksands, so you need to book a visit and provide identity papers. This is a similar situation to the Russian Military Studies Centre which is held at the Joint Services Command and Staff College at Shrivenham.
Conferences, seminars, papers and video presentations
Once you have joined the association in your subject area, attend their conferences and other activities, both to meet other scholars, discover the latest research topics and get yourself known. You will find other places to go, such as the seminars held at King’s College, London, at the Sir Michael Howard Centre, Department of War Studies such as King's Maritime History Seminars run by Andrew Lambert. Similarly the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London runs one of the largest programmes of seminars with ones on Military History, Transport and Digital History and some of these are now being run on Zoom.
Having gained some experience in attending conferences, you may get an opportunity to present a paper. Usually a ‘Call for Papers’ is put out by email, or in a newsletter about 4-6 months in advance of the conference and you have to meet the entrance requirements. Each presentation lasts around 20 to 30 minute on a short subject in front of 2-30 people during the conference or another format is to draw up a poster which then gets a 5 minute talk. During the current lockdown, the BCMH has replaced their conference seminars with online ones at History Goes On.
Writing book reviews and research notes
An easy way to start writing and getting your work read by other researchers is to write book reviews and research notes for journals, newsletters, on your blog, your association’s blog. Usually organisations are sent review copies by publishers and then they put out a call to members an offer to review them. Or contact the association’s secretary and ask to be put on their list for review opportunities. Book reviews are great way of showcasing your writing and analytical skill since you have to dissect the book in front of you, discover its main themes, compare these to the current mainstream historiography and then write about whether these changes are supportable and justified. Moving on it might be possible to write to your target journals and see if they would accept a book review from you to be published in the journals that covers your project area. Similarly with ‘research notes’ where you write a short 1-2,000 piece on the latest (hopefully yours,) research in outline and again brings you to the attention of the journal editor.
Journal articles
By this stage you have probably moved onto early PhD or post PhD level, however there are numerous examples of non-academic scholars getting published in journals, including me. If your research is novel, interesting and supported by evidence, journals will publish an article of yours. Yet before you start it is best to understand that there is a whole mechanism to the publishing process that you need to understand to improve your chances. Now I went on an excellent course run by the Guardian newspaper called “How to write an academic paper and get it published” run by Olivia Timbs, editor of the Pharmaceutical Journal, to learn about it from the perspective of a author, since I only had experience from the publishing side. I have not seen this course run since 2018, however there are excellent books such as this one published by Taylor and Francis, “Writing for Peer Reviewed Journals", since they publish around 2,700 journals, they want you to get it right before submission.
Catherine Breshkovsky 1917, leading SR and ‘grandmother of the Revolution’
There are some basic things to understand about journals, the first one of which is that each journal has a statement of “Aims and Scope” which define what the journal covers. Your research has to be written and framed to fit this brief. It is always worth having a look at the Editorial Board since this will give you a good idea of who set policy at the journal and what their outlook is likely to be. Aside from this, there are stylistic restrictions placed on your journals in terms of length, style, citation style, etc and these can usually be found in a section called “Instructions for authors” or something similar. The third, and in many ways the most important thing to understand, is that the decision to pass your draft journal onwards, rests with the Editor.
You have to know about the Editor, usually a senior academic, what they have published themselves, their views and background and where they sit in the historiographic debate. At the end of the day, your draft journal has to impress this single person. If you do and they like your piece, then it is passed onto two senior academics to read through and assess for ‘peer review’. If it passes their scrutiny, they will write back anonymously through the editor with their comments and they may well ask for additional material to be included, changes to the structure of the paper, comments on your writing style or even a complete rewrite, and heavens forbid, a rejection slip. Do not be discouraged, anything short of a rewrite is a win and you should try and work constructively with the peer reviewers to meet their requests. They know the journal objectives and style intimately, they are almost certainly leading figures in your field and most of them are trying to help. Do be aware that there are some which are referred to as “Reviewer Two”, who are obnoxious, argumentative for their own sake and push their own agenda no matter what. In cases such as these the Editor is your friend and probably aware of the problem anyway.
Every time I went through this process I learnt something new. My second article came with a change of editor, from Colonel David Glantz, an intelligence analyst, to Prof Alexander Hill, who insisted on a proper academic style to my submitted essay. He spent a lot of time, gong through all my stylistic errors and showing me how to correct them, before sending it off to be peer reviewed. Hugely valuable experience that allowed me to submit correctly to other journals. Another journal article went through three exchanges with two peer reviewers who made me change and tighten up the structure of the paper to make my argument stronger. I worked with them constructively and ultimately, they accepted the paper, saying that it was excellent research just ‘written at the level of a second year undergraduate.’ This process can be brutal.
Peer reviewing
Once you have established yourself in your field, and in academic career terms, probably after your PhD thesis, a journal editor or book publisher may approach you to peer review another person’s work. Early experience gained in reviewing books will be of help, as will a deep understanding of your subject area.
Writing monographs and books
Nowadays with the rise of self-publishing it is possible for anyone to write a book, publish it on a platform such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (paperbacks and Kindle sold through Amazon or your own website,) or Lulu (paperbacks or e-books sold through your website, online retailers, traditional bookshop and library suppliers,) and sell direct to the public. However as a friend of mine discovered, there is value in the editorial process, in raising the standard of your published work and the publishing process will help promote your book to the right academic outlets, journals and university libraries.
V. I. Lenin in his study in the Kremlin with an American economist P.-P. Christensen.
It is important for career academics to get their dissertation or thesis published as a monograph, as this is one of the most important milestones of their career. Getting your monograph or book published is just the start and to gain credibility as well as sales, it is important to get book reviews in journals and your work discussed in academia. There is nothing to stop an independent researcher or scholar publishing their own work, however it would be useful for them to approach a traditional publisher, if nothing else to gain insight into the structure and outline of their work.
Publishers are often willing to discuss an outline accompanied by a sample chapter and will be able to tell you what is of interest to the academic market and what is unlikely to succeed. Moreover an opinion from a publisher who covers your field and has published other academics works in this area, is likely to be a highly valuable source of advice and information. Even if you are not offered a book deal, publishing with a traditional house and go down the self, publishing route, it would be wise to send out review copies to suitable journals and publications, library suppliers and any other organisations in your academic field to promote the book. Organisations such as Stone & Stone information service and Gardners Library Supply, (which since the collapse of Bertrams in August 2020 is now the only major book wholesaler in the UK,) would be worth approaching as well as smaller book wholesalers in your field, such as Phoenix Academic Book Supply.
Conclusion
Your research is important to you and represents a huge commitment in terms of time and energy, so it is worth spending a little more time and effort in nurturing its growth. Establishing a network of scholars working in your field will help your further research, give you new ideas and keep you up to date with the latest thinking. Likewise training in new skills will make it easier to turn your raw research into a finished paper. Finally promoting your research through the established channels, in an efficient manner, will get it noticed by your peers and raise your profile and open further doors. Above all remember that this is a social activity fuelled by beer, talking about your favourite subject, so enjoy it.
Society of itinerants 1880s