Home » History » Careers In History » Publishing Your Way to Tenure

Publishing Your Way to Tenure

© Chelsea Paige Buffington

The amount of publications needed for tenure varies greatly from school to school. At research institutions, publications are crucial to obtaining tenure, requiring a minimum of one monograph, usually at least two. At these schools, writing a more popular work will not be considered. Articles will also carry little weight. Research institutions expect serious research in your field culminating in multiple monographic works.

At other institutions, a combination of articles and books, perhaps including books written for a more popular audience, will be considered for tenure. While monographs will be the most significant in tenure review, articles and other works of history will show that you are active in the field along with your duties as a teacher and a member of your institution's community. Less research-oriented schools will want a balance of publications, teaching, and service.

What is clear is that to gain tenure, you must publish. The first step to a monograph can be your dissertation. Get feedback from your committee on whether your dissertation could become a book and what needs to be done to submit it to a publisher. The most important task is to change the terminology, referring to your manuscript as a book rather than a dissertation. It is also important to pare down historiography. If possible, you should have written your dissertation as a book rather than as a dissertation from the beginning.

Dissertations can produce a monograph as well as multiple articles. In each case you must structure your dissertation toward a new audience. Once you are ready to submit your monograph or article, especially if they are related to your dissertation, you may want to ask a colleague to review the manuscript before submission. Dissertation submissions are often criticized for an overabundance of historiography as well as other aspects of the work written specifically for committee members. Try to avoid these criticisms.

If you have already published your dissertation or have found that it is not publishable, it is time to move on to new ideas. The best way to get published is to present your ideas at conferences. Conferences are an important place to make contacts in the field, to gain feedback on your ideas, and a place to find out what others in your field are researching. It is likely that your institution will expect you to attend at least one conference per year and good use of this would be to present. Often a conference presentation can lead to an article that may eventually lead to a monograph, therefore, affecting tenure.

The copyright of the article Publishing Your Way to Tenure in Careers In History is owned by . Permission to republish Publishing Your Way to Tenure in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.