Pitching for Publication: Translating Your Academic Expertise for a Popular Audience
Join us for a Graduate Student workshop with Sarah Mesle, Rebecca Onion, and Phil Maciak in a conversation about writing for different audiences and pitching academic work to editors of public-facing outlets.
Sarah Mesle is Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California. She is editor at large at the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she also writes for the "Dear Television" column. She is co-founder and editor of the LARB channel Avidly and, with Sarah Blackwood, the co-editor of the NYU Short book series, Avidly Reads. A nineteenth-centuryist by training, she is interested generally in the long history of popular culture, from the rise of the sentimental bestseller to today. Her celebrity profiles have appeared in magazines like InStyle, Self, and Goop.
Rebecca Onion lives in Athens, Ohio, and writes about culture, history, and childhood for magazines, newspapers, and the Internet. She is currently a staff writer for Slate.com. She holds a Ph.D in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her book, Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Public Science in the United States, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016.
Phillip Maciak is the TV editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the author of a book about religion and early cinema called The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), and his film, television, and literary criticism has appeared in Slate, Film Quarterly, J19, PMLA, The New Republic, and other venues. He is also the co-founder—with Jane Hu, Evan Kindley, and Lili Loofbourow—of the “Dear Television” column. He teaches in the English Department and the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis.
If you're interested in joining us, e-mail co-organizer Noah Cohan for Zoom link.