Please join the Vagantes board for our second Mentorship & Professionalization event!
Dissertation to Book Roundtable with Cynthia Hahn, Maggie Solberg, and Anne E. Lester
Hosted by Vagantes Board Mentorship & Professionalization Representative Kris Racaniello in advance of the Vagantes 2025 Conference at Duke-UNC.
Friday, March 28th, 3:00pm EST, on Zoom
No matter where you are in the graduate student process, writing your first book often seems like a monumental task. Where do you begin? What are Embargoes? What’s a realistic timeline to publication? How do you land a book contract–– and how do you know which publishing house is best for your project?
Please join the Vagantes community for a conversation with three experts, who will share their dissertation-to-book experience (and beyond!): Cynthia Hahn, Maggie Solberg, and Anne E. Lester. Our guests will help illuminate the sometimes opaque process of publication at the critical transitional moment between graduate student and junior research professional.
This is the second Mentorship & Professionalization meeting outside of the Vagantes conference. Our goal is to build solidarity and real, horizontal working relationships beyond our yearly conference through this working platform. We encourage your participation, and are especially excited to answer questions you might have about the publishing process.
*Links to further resources will be shared at the end of the meeting.
Register here to receive the Zoom link for our meeting!
More on our guest speakers and their publications:
Cynthia Hahn teaches early and late medieval art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has published numerous books, including Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of the Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century, University of California Press, 2001, Strange Beauty: Origins and Issues in the Making of Medieval Reliquaries 400-circa 1204, Penn State University Press, 2012, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object, Reaktion Press, London, 2017, “The Thing of Mine I have Loved the Best:” Significant Jewels, (Exhibition catalog, Les Enluminures, New York), 2018, and recently two short books on Passion Relics from University of California Press, 2020, and Heart’s Desire: The Darnley Jewel, the National Gallery of Scotland Gordon Watson lecture.
Anne E. Lester teaches social history of medieval Europe and the Levant at Johns Hopkins University. Her book publications include Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011 (winner of the SMFS Best First Book Prize), Crusades and Memory: Rethinking Past and Present, co-edited with Megan Cassidy-Welch, Routledge, 2015, and Between Orders and Heresy: Rethinking Medieval Religious Movements, co-edited with Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, University of Toronto Press, 2022.
Emma Maggie Solberg teaches British medieval literature and culture at Bowdoin College. Her recent book is Virgin Whore, Cornell University Press, 2018. A variety of her other publications include “A History of ‘The Mysteries,” Early Theatre 19.1 (2016), “Bookworms, Human and Insect,” postmedieval 11.1 (2020), “On the Shimmer of the Black Madonna,” Exemplaria 34.4 (2023), “The Bowl Truth: On Joan of Arc’s much-maligned and forgotten haircut,” History News Network (2024), and “Experiments in Teaching Medieval Women’s Writing,” The Sundial: Premodern Pasts, Inclusive Futures (2023).