The Future of Scholarly Writing

“Bammer and Boetcher Joeres have thrown a party and invited all the coolest people. The result is an inspiring and forward-looking book that urges scholars in the humanities and social sciences to reimagine the staid conventions of academic discourse and to approach the challenges of scholarly writing in a spirit of poetry, playfulness, and joy.”

– Helen Sword, Professor and Director of Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education (CLeaR), The University of Auckland, New Zealand and author of Stylish Academic Writing
“This is a wonderful book, from beginning to end. By turns funny and serious, personal and professional, its ideas and its practices of writing slyly and lovingly reshape ideas about what scholarly writers do, and what they might do if they were free.”

– Eric Hayot, Professor of Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University, USA
“This is a profoundly important book. As universities face multiple crises, from corporatization on the inside to charges of irrelevance from the outside, it is essential that scholars give as much attention to how they write as to what they write. Scholarship, especially in the humanities, is at risk of becoming meaningless unless we can communicate what is important about our work to a wide range of readers inside and outside the academy. The contributors to this volume provide many worthwhile paths to guide academic writing into the future.”

– Elaine Tyler May, Professor of American Studies and History, University of Minnesota, USA and author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation

Angelika Bammer is Associate Professor of InterdisciplinaryHumanitiesand Comparative Literature at Emory University, USA. She hasreceivedfellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowmentfor theHumanities, and the National Humanities Center and is the authorofPartial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s, the editorofDisplacements: Cultural Identities in Question, and the producer ofamulti-media installation of her work on Memory Sites: Destruction,Lossand Transformation. Her engagement with the issues explored inthevolume on academic writing that she has co-edited has marked much ofher professional career. Most recently, she has developed a set ofgraduate courses and workshops on academic writing called “The Art ofScholarlyWriting,” “Experiments in Scholarly Form,” and “ExplorationsinInterdisciplinary Scholarship” for which she was honored withtheprestigious Emory Williams Award for distinction in Humanitiesteaching.

Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres is Professor Emerita ofGerman and Women’s Studies atthe University of Minnesota, USA. She wasthe editor of Signs from1990-1995 and has received fellowships from theFulbright Foundation,the National Endowment for the Humanities, theAlexander vonHumboldt-Stiftung, and the American Philosophical Society.She was therecipient of the 2004 Distinguished Women Scholars Award inHumanities,Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota. She hasthought about, taught, and presented lectures on the topic ofacademicwriting for much of her career, including the jointly writtenandpresented “Writing That Matters: An E-pistolary Dialogue,”withAngelika Bammer at the 2007 annual conference of Women in German and the 2006 Ada Comstock Distinguished Women Scholars Lecture intheHumanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, “The Universal Appeal oftheParticular.”