The course will not be covering issues of academic writing and publishing from a theoretical standpoint. It will instead be delivered in an experiential and collaborative fashion. To enroll in the course each participant will be required to share the draft of an original research paper that they are planning to submit to academic journals and/or edited volumes for publication well before the start.

In the first class the general aspects of academic writing and publishing will be covered, while concretely analyzing the inner argumentative structures, formal aspects, and overall features of successful sample articles. Starting from the second class, the participants will interactively peer-review each of the shared drafts together with Salvatore, to collectively assess how such drafts can be concretely improved and turned into publishable texts. Based on these experiential exercises of guided peer review, the participants will be finally asked to re-work their drafts into final versions to be submitted to academic publishers by the end of the course.

Course objectives

The course addresses multiple learning outcomes. By the end of the course, the participants should be able to:

1. Improve their academic writing skills;
2. Improve their capacity to strategize productive publication plans;
3. Recognize the main features of publishable research articles in fields of the humanities and cultural studies and implement such features in their own writings;
4. Conduct rigorous and yet supportive peer reviews;
5. Have an original research paper of their own ready to be submitted to academic editors for potential publication.

Lecturer

Dr Salvatore Giusto holds a PhD in economic and political anthropology and is currently a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities. He is a cultural anthropologist working on the digital culture of Neapolitan criminality, sitting now between European Studies and Media Studies.