How Do You Know if a Dissertation Is Published

An excerpt from

From Dissertation to Book

by William Germano

Getting Started, Once again

A young scholar completes a Ph.D. thesis and is congratulated by the supervising committee. A outset-rate piece of work, information technology deserves the adulation. "Yous must publish this, Pat, and soon," one committee fellow member says, and goes on to suggest two or three publishing houses to which Pat might now write. Encouraged past the response, Pat sends off the manuscript, fresh from the defense. So the writer waits, simply it's not a long wait. The manuscript comes back from the publisher. The pages, which announced not to have been disturbed, are accompanied by a annotation. It isn't even a personal notation, merely a form letter of the alphabet. "Beloved Author," the letter reads, "Terribly lamentable. Nosotros don't publish unrevised dissertations." The new Ph.D. is understandably frustrated. "If scholarly publishers don't desire what I've simply written, why was I brash to write this, and to write information technology this manner? I'm encouraged to publish apace. My committee praised my work. Simply publishers don't want it. What am I doing wrong?"

The answer is easy. Pat wrote a thesis, not a book.

A dissertation is written under the watchful eyes of a director and an advisory committee. Sometimes that structure may be a brunt, or even an obstacle, for the writer. Having the wrong commission can make writing slower and more hard than it need be. But whether one'south doctoral advisors form a well-knit team or a dysfunctional family unit, they form a support grouping, one handed to the writer by the university.

Once you exit the institution where you were awarded your degree, that support structure can seem, in retrospect, a cracking asset no longer in reach. Your university's requirements, downwards to the language of your dissertation proposal and the number of capacity your committee insists you produce, establish a prepare of rules—a grammar, if you like—inside which you produce the dissertation. That framework is both a harness and a help, and information technology determines the shape of an argument, the nature of the prose, the stride of writing, even the place where the writing will be done.

Pat, the new Ph.D. whose unrevised dissertation has just been rejected by a publisher, isn't doing annihilation Pat hasn't been led to believe is right. But the operating instructions of scholarly publishing rarely class a part of graduate training, which means that immature scholars are usually thinking about the bookish book business for the first fourth dimension when the dissertation is already consummate. That'southward late.

In today's market, even a first-rate dissertation may fail to find a publisher, at to the lowest degree on the author'southward first effort. Who and then is at fault? An inexperienced writer? A cautious editor adamant to minimize financial risk for the publishing firm? A dissertation committee out of bear on with scholarly publishing today? The tenure organization, with its demand for book-length publication in the face of increasingly unattractive odds?

Open up Secrets

To scholarly publishers it seems that for generations, dissertations have been built on a surprisingly simple formula. Choose a topic, preferably one sufficiently narrow that no one else has elected precisely the aforementioned territory for exploration. Read everything written on the topic. Demonstrate, with less or greater subtlety, that yous've actually done this reading via hundreds of endnotes, footnotes, and superscripts. Disagree with some attribute of received stance almost your topic. Certificate everything. Offer analyses that support your position. Although that may be the recipe for a dissertation, information technology isn't the formula for a book.

This isn't to say that dissertations aren't valuable works of scholarship. Each year graduate students complete interesting, provocative, even groundbreaking dissertations. Their advisors are encouraging fresh subjects, as well equally fresh approaches. Each year dissertations appear that volition get books. (Become—not are already—books.) To approximate by the manuscripts that scholars send to publishing houses, the majority of the theses for which the Ph.D. is awarded are still highly limited enterprises—confident treatments of narrow subjects, making claims to boldness merely doing so by means of elaborate reference to the work of others. The average dissertation wears its confidence and its insecurity in equal mensurate.

That mixture of diffidence and bravura shows up in nigh all doctoral piece of work. When a dissertation crosses my desk, I unremarkably want to grab information technology by its metaphorical lapels and requite it a good milkshake. "You lot know something!" I would say if it could hear me. "Now tell it to united states in linguistic communication nosotros tin can empathize!" It isn't the dissertation I desire to milkshake, of course, information technology'due south the dissertation'south writer. The "united states" I want the author to speak to isn't but anyone, either, but the targeted readership that will benefit from a scholarly book. The recalcitrant garden-variety dissertation—lips sealed, secrets intact—will find a readership among ii hundred library collections at all-time. Near won't make it even that far, but linger at the ready in electronic format waiting for some dauntless soul to call for a download or a photocopy.

Information technology's hard to selection upwardly a dissertation and hear its author'south voice. Dissertations don't pipe upward. Like the kid in the choir who's agape she cannot carry a tune and doesn't want to exist found out, the dissertation makes every bit small a sound equally possible. Ofttimes that audio is heard by a committee of from three to five scholars, and no i else. Revising a dissertation is partly a matter of making the author's text speak up.

Merely what is it about the dissertation that makes it so unlikely that it can be made to speak? 1 senior scholar, veteran of many dissertation committees, cheerfully told me that the doctoral thesis was, at heart, a paranoid genre. "You're writing information technology to protect yourself," the professor observed, and significant, too, that you are therefore non writing in order to create as bold and imaginative a piece of work every bit possible. The dissertation is always looking over its shoulder. If you're writing in literary studies, for example, your dissertation may be looking backward to be sure it's safety from Foucault, Freud, Butler, and Bhabha, non that any of these worthies are threatening either y'all or your thesis in any mode. To disarm your deities, you lot cite, paraphrase, and incorporate the ideas of leading scholars now at piece of work. You pour libations to the loudest of the influential dead. The more you do this, the more hard it becomes to run across where your own work ends and the ideas of the Masters begin, so thoroughly has your writing absorbed a way of expressing itself. Then at that place are the scholars who sit on your dissertation committee. They may not be famous, merely for the moment they are the Kindly Ones—the Eumenides—and you will want them on your side. These are natural responses to potency, to one'south teachers, to those who will pass judgment on your work. All this looking over the shoulder may be good for self-protection, but it gets betwixt you and the book y'all would like to be writing.

The Non-Yet-a-Volume

Many factors militate against a dissertation becoming a book. Yet some dissertations do, and many of these have the potential to become quite skilful books, a potential they oft exercise non fulfill. The process by which a dissertation becomes a book has several intermediate stages, the most of import of which is the transformation from ane kind of unpublished manuscript into another, that is, from an unpublished Ph.D. thesis into an as-yet-unpublished book manuscript. Each is by the same author, each contains many of the same words and ideas, each is unpublished. The start is a stack of paper an editor simply won't consider for publication, and the second is one the editor will expect at with professional interest. You need to pique that interest.

Revising is lonely work, even for a young scholar trying to make sense of a freshly completed dissertation. Maybe yous've completed your degree by at present. You may or may not have a chore. In the evenings, and on weekends, you lot're working on the volume based on your dissertation. This thing yous're working on now has no advisor, no commission. Unless you're already under contract to a publisher, no 1 is demanding that chapters of your book emerge from your printer according to a strict schedule. You lot might, of form, arrange an informal commission to spur you on, simply information technology will be a committee of your own making, probably friends and colleagues corralled into reading drafts and chapters. As they read your piece of work, they will be weighing both their words and the strength of your friendship. Unlike a dissertation advisor, your all-time friend probably won't read a sloppily written stretch of prose, look you in the eye, and say, "This won't do." A good dissertation advisor will say exactly that, and then become on to suggest how you might fix it. Unfortunately, that aforementioned skillful dissertation advisor may not be on telephone call six months after yous've been awarded your doctorate and are sitting downwardly, past yourself, to turn a humble thesis into something glorious and public.

In some means it would exist simpler not to revise your dissertation at all and just begin with a fresh subject. Discard the whole matter—the research, the structure, the prose. Some writers practise simply that; picking up the Ph.D., they lay down the dissertation and never look dorsum. Ane tin can even contend that it isn't a total loss, since what the student learned from writing the dissertation doesn't evaporate, and the expertise garnered in writing it will now hold the author in good stead. Simply a new thought is stirring in the author's brain, and this fourth dimension, he says to himself, he volition practice it his manner. It's my guess that many writers of dissertations wish they had the luxury of doing something similar this—a peachy new idea, the courage to turn away from the recently completed thesis, and the institutional freedom to spend the next year or two on something entirely new.

Before you begin, y'all may accept to practise something so tough information technology can be crippling: overcome your boredom—maybe fifty-fifty revulsion—at what lies in front end of you. Every scholar knows what author's cake feels like, and dissertation writers are a target group for this disorder, specially in the twilight period of postdegree revisions. Subsequently having spent and then much time working on a long and difficult project, some scholars only cannot render to it. Suddenly, it'south easier to exercise cipher or to send it out unrevised.

Resist that temptation. An unrevised dissertation is a manuscript no ane wants to see, just that doesn't necessarily hateful leaving yours in a desk drawer. Equally long as your piece of work has potential, you owe it to yourself to find out what it tin do. Rethink, determine, make your plans for revision and carry them through. Until you know what yous have, yous tin't know what remains to be done. Revising the dissertation may be going back to square one, stripping the whole project downwards to its chassis, or it might be something much less desperate. At least the material is familiar. At the moment, withal, the affair before you, the manuscript that but a couple of months ago was your dissertation, is now something transitional, the not-withal-a-book. One time y'all can face up your dissertation every bit actually something in the middle of its journey, you tin can begin to see it every bit others might.

What an Idea Looks Like

Like all writers, scholars depend upon words used as precisely as possible. In contemporary academic English, "thesis" and "dissertation" are almost interchangeable, and in this book I'll use them that way merely to provide some variety. A thesis can, of course, exist a principal's thesis or an undergraduate thesis, simply a dissertation is always written for a doctoral degree. The dictionary's succinct definition of a dissertation omits any mention of a proposition to be defended, and length seems to be the dissertation's principal characteristic. A thesis might be very brief indeed. Martin Luther came upwards with ninety-five of them, and crammed them all onto a document correctly sized for a church door. For modern-twenty-four hours academics, a dissertation is expected to incorporate a thesis, that is, this lengthy exposition of evidence and analysis is supposed to contain a cadre statement. Information technology might be said that the thesis inhabits and animates the dissertation. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems, at least to publishers, that the thesis—the eye of the dissertation—has stopped ticking. Argument gone, all that is left is length.

As they are bandied nearly past scholars, journalists, and the academic reading public, the words "thesis," "hypothesis," "theory," and "thought" have become hopelessly entangled. In the Great Age of Theory, that heady flow from the late sixties through the late nineties, many a small idea came packaged as a Theory, with bona fide credentials leading dorsum to Continental masters. The humanities yearned for the potency of abstraction. The social sciences were hardly allowed—many of the most important theorists, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, came from the social scientific discipline world. If theory aspired to a condition of intellectual purity, or inspired thousands of scholars to do and so, it was a condition impossible to sustain for long. Theories of everything sprang upwards, with a concreteness that made it possible for a reader to connect a Big Abstract Franco-German language Thought with educational practice in Illinois or the use of personal pronouns in Shakespeare's late plays.

Every bit theory became the queen of disciplines, it seemed that every immature scholar was under the double obligation not but to come upward with a theory, but to exercise information technology in a manner that was—truly, madly, deeply—theoretical. A good idea might be an embarrassment when what was wanted was a highly philosophical test of the bailiwick, enriched with the work of High german and French thinkers. "Equally Foucault has said," "Co-ordinate to Hegel," "Every bit Derrida has written," became the incipits of much bookish writing, both at the professorial and graduate student levels. Theory meant many things to many people.

Fifty-fifty today, many dissertations autumn into the trap of making claims too one thousand for the testify mustered by the author. All likewise oft, a small and perceptive idea is dressed up in clothes ii sizes too big and trotted out as a theory. Publishers sympathize that a graduate student needs to demonstrate what he or she knows. But the book that a dissertation hopes to become won't piece of work if it appears to exist a cottage built somewhere on the rolling manor of another scholar's work. It would be healthy if dissertations could be entitled "My Footnotes to Jameson" or "Two Small Thoughts about Bretton Woods"—healthy, honest fifty-fifty, but unlikely to win the author a job.

A thesis is a work of scholarship and argumentation, and its primary role is to demonstrate that you are able to undertake professional person-level piece of work. It isn't necessarily professional-level work in itself, though sometimes information technology can come close to that. Much is fabricated nigh the idea of the writer's "thesis"—the argument inside the dissertation—as if each of the new Ph.D.'s created each year were expected to come up with a blinding insight. It was never so. Nearly dissertations accept been written on the shoulders of giants. Many practise fifty-fifty less, and just step on the giants' toes. A wise dissertation director once counseled a nave graduate student that the dissertation would be the last slice of his student writing, not his kickoff professional work. (It was good communication, and I've never regretted him giving information technology to me.) Every editor at a scholarly publishing house knows this, and virtually dissertation directors know it, besides.

A dissertation demonstrates technical competence more than often than an original theory or a 18-carat argument. This is, in fact, another of those open secrets of academic publishing: a book doesn't actually need an original theory. It'due south often more than than enough to synthesize a range of ideas or perspectives, as long every bit i can do it in a way that creates a new perspective (your own) and provides the reader with further insights into an interesting problem. Every bit bookish publishers know, the starting time book manuscript volition try to make claims it tin can't fulfill. Your book does need a decision-making idea, though. A thesis isn't a hypothesis. Back in junior loftier, when the scientific method first came into view, most of us tested ideas on the order of "My hypothesis is that a dry leafage will burn faster than a green one." Or "Snails will eat pizza." We learned something nearly method, even when the dark-green leaf failed to burn and the snails ignored the half onion, half actress-cheese. The first hypothesis was proven truthful, the 2d false. A doctoral thesis doesn't test an idea in the aforementioned way. You couldn't, for example, write a dissertation that tested the validity of the idea that terrestrial mollusks will consume fast food; there are improve things for a biologist to be working on, and the issue isn't likely to be something that would make a volume. You could challenge someone else's thesis—for case, the art historian Millard Meiss's thought that the plague in fourteenth-century Italy changed the style painters represented God. Merely in challenging it, you had improve come up with a decision that takes exception to Meiss. It won't practice to "examination" the thesis and conclude that Meiss was right. And you tin't posit a dubious thought just to exam it and find it wrong. "Dickens was the least pop British novelist of the nineteenth century." This is imitation, and there isn't whatever point in "testing" information technology merely to testify that the idea is baseless. I've offered examples that are intentionally exaggerated, but a more uncomfortable scenario might concern the thesis that argues an intelligent point badly, draws false inferences from good data, or builds a structure on a few readings as if they could by themselves map your universe of possibilities.

Some dissertations wrestle with their origins. Can you outmaneuver your famous dissertation director? Challenge the dominant paradigm in your field? Attack the work of the chair of the virtually important section in your subject field? Any of these forays will create controversy, and controversy isn't necessarily bad. But information technology doesn't mean that a dissertation that gets you into hot h2o within your field is automatically one that volition be publishable equally a volume. Sometimes a immature scholar needs to phase certain arguments in gild to break free of powerful influences, and sometimes that will exist liberating for the writer. But the contentious dissertation isn't de facto more than publishable than one that picks no academic quarrels.

A thesis is an argument, not a proposition to exist tested. A doctoral thesis, however, is quite ofttimes not an statement at all, but only a very small part of a bigger argument taking identify in i's discipline or in American society or in culture more than broadly. There's a tension here between the imperative to exist creative and the need to take a place in the larger conversation that is one's scholarly field. A good dissertation managing director will skillfully guide a graduate student to a dissertation project that will give her the opportunity to show her stuff and not fall off a cliff or get stuck in a corner.

A good academic idea is connected to what has gone before information technology, modest in acknowledging the work on which information technology depends, just fresh. It'due south not necessary for the thought to be startling or implausible on page i, wrestling for the reader'south consent, and winning it by a fall on page 350. An idea for a book can be quiet, noisy, insidious, overheated, cool, revisionist, radical, counterintuitive, restorative, synthetic. Ideas are as different every bit the minds they inhabit. Some writers find it terribly difficult to say what their thought is. "If you lot want to know what I have to say, read the manuscript!" a frustrated author declares. In a sense, that author is right—if yous desire to know what a author has to say, read her thoroughly and with care. Only that doesn't hateful that it'southward impossible to summarize her piece of work or to notice in it something nosotros are happy to phone call her '"thought." Your idea may be a massive corrective—recollect of the work on Stalin'south Russia made possible by declassified documents—or a written report that looks at St. Paul's well-studied writings in what Dickinson calls "a certain slant of light," finding nuances and making small connections because yous were there, thinking, at a certain moment. I keep an Ansel Adams affiche in my role. More nosotros admit, books are like photographs, possible only because the camera and the eye were fortunate to be somewhere at the very moment when the clouds held their shape just long enough.

Copyright find: Excerpt from pages 12-21 of From Dissertation to Volume by William Germano, published by the University of Chicago Printing. ©2005 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accord with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic grade, provided that this entire detect, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Printing.

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William Germano
From Dissertation to Volume
©2005, 152 pages
Textile $35.00 ISBN: 0-226-28845-v
Paper $16.00 0-226-28846-3

For information on purchasing the volume—from bookstores or hither online—please become to the webpage for From Dissertation to Volume.

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• Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books by William Germano • Read an extract.
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