Manuscript Conference Award
Sponsored by the Author Development Program and the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence
What: Funding for a Conference All about Your Book Manuscript
Who: All full-time, untenured faculty members are eligible
When: Applications are due December 1, 2009.
We are pleased to announce a new grant for junior faculty, made possible by support from the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence. This award of $2000 will help to defray the cost of a meeting focused on critique of a first book manuscript. Such conferences offer an opportunity for authors to receive feedback from senior colleagues in a time-frame useful for revision.
The idea for this award was suggested by Emory faculty members eager to see their junior colleagues receive additional support for the development of their first books. Research found that faculty at several other institutions, like Princeton, Dartmouth, University of Michigan, and Northwestern University, have benefitted from funding for manuscript conferences in recent years. Typically, faculty authors invite two to three experts in their field from off-campus to join two or three colleagues from their own institution for a one-day meeting. This meeting usually lasts for several hours and may be broken into two sessions, but the focus is always discussion of a draft of the author’s book manuscript. Advanced graduate students interested in the topic often are invited to participate in at least part of the discussion. Authors we consulted have found such manuscript conferences a wonderful way to receive revision suggestions from experts in their fields before their book enters the peer review process with a university press.
The Center for Faculty Development and Excellence hopes to fund one such conference in the upcoming academic year.
Email this application to Amy Benson Brown (abrow01@emory.edu) by December 1, 2009. We expect to announce a winner of the grant at the beginning of the Spring term 2010.
Authors who have benefited from such meetings in the past recommend planning the conference with substantial lead time. The guest reviewers typically need to receive the draft of the manuscript three months prior to the date of the meeting. We also recommend that before applying for this award, faculty members discuss this possibility with their departmental chairs or leaders of programs with which they are affiliated for advice on the feasibility of time-frames and potential guests to invite to review their work.
