About Us
Author Development Program History
The program began as a pilot, called the Manuscript Development Program, in 2002, in Emory University’s Office of the Provost. Historically, faculty development initiatives have focused on supporting professors as teachers. Changes in publishing in recent decades, however, demand increased consideration of how to support faculty as writers. For background information about the crisis in scholarly publishing and the changing nexus of relations among scholars, libraries, and university presses, click here.
The Author Development Program organizes faculty panel discussions and workshops on a variety of issues related to writing and publishing.
In 2009, we changed our program name from “manuscript development” to “author development.” The new name reflects the fact that the mediums and forms of scholarly inquiry are changing. What remains unchanged is the need for intellectuals to cultivate their own voices, to develop their authority to speak both within the academy and beyond it.
While we work with many authors from the College of Arts and Sciences, we also enjoy reading manuscripts for authors from the schools of Medicine, Public Health, Theology, Business, and Law. Often, writers who contact us wish to make their ideas more accessible to interdisciplinary audiences or those outside the academy. Consultations also address questions about steps in the publishing process with various types of presses, from university presses to commercial houses. We are also interested in helping to facilitate writers’ groups, as we did with a group of faculty focused on writing biographies from spring 2007 through fall 2009.
In addition to a list of past events, articles about this program’s evolution are listed below. When we designed this program in 2002, we looked for models or similar efforts at other universities and found very little. In recent years, however, programs to support faculty authors have sprung up at variety of schools, such as the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and the University of Michigan. Other programs, focused on copyright issues in particular and the changing landscape of scholarly publishing, have taken root at Harvard University, MIT, University of Pennsylvannia, and many other schools. To learn more about the initiative focused on intellectual property at Emory University, please contact Lisa Macklin in Woodruff Library’s Office of Intellectual Property.
We always welcome hearing news of other efforts on other campuses. To contact us, email Amy Benson Brown at abrow01@emory.edu.
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Related Articles
“Professors Get Advice on Breaking Into Print” By Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 19, 2008. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i17/17a00103.htm
“Where Manuscript Development Meets Faculty Development” Amy Benson Brown, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, January 2006 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_scholarly_publishing/v037/37.2brown.htm
“Publish or Perish” Mary Loftus, Emory Magazine, Autumn 2005
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/autumn_2005/precis_publish.htm
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