3.1 Focused discussion with mid-career and senior scholars  (Page 8/7)

The focused discussion with mid-career and senior scholars in art and architectural history took place onFriday, November 18, 2005 at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Twelve scholars took part in the discussion. Thedemographic characteristics of the group were as follows:

• Sex: 6 men, 6 women
• Race: 12 white
• Age: 2 ages 35-44, 7 ages 45-54, 2 ages 55-64, 1 age 65+

Specific subfields represented by the participants included art of the European Middle Ages, late19th-century European art, modern and contemporary art, 17th-century Dutch art, history of Chinese art, 18th to20th-century art, Roman art and architecture, early modern art history, Renaissance and Baroque architecture and art, Americanart, pre-Columbian art, and Islamic art and architecture.

The publishing-related concerns expressed by the mid-career and senior art history scholars clustered broadlyinto the following categories:

• Dissertations, articles, books, and the tenure process.
• Electronic publishing.
• Defining the problem of“art history publishing”in comprehensive terms and finding solutions.

(For purposes of readability, I will refer to mid-career and senior scholars simply as“mid-career scholars”for the remainder of this section.)

Dissertations, articles, books, and the tenure process

Mid-career scholars in art and architectural history are acutely aware of the publishing-related challengesfacing younger scholars in the field. They observe that while opportunities to publish dissertations as books have noticeablydeclined during the past 10 to 20 years, tenure criteria have changed little, if at all. As a result, mid-career scholars aredivided as to how best advise their graduate students in navigating these challenges.

For many, if not most, mid-career scholars, the operating model for career advancement in art history when theywere graduate students was to write a dissertation and then work to turn it into a book following graduation. [Of course, the scholarswho participated in this discussion are, by definition, successful in their fields (since they are now, in fact, mid-career arthistory scholars) and thus more likely than less successful members of their cohorts to report positive experiences in publishing theirdissertations. Nevertheless, they spoke of conditions as having changed and that today’s younger scholars could no longer expect to follow the same paths to success in art and architectural historythat they had.]

One scholar said,“I wrote a very long dissertation, which Cambridge commissioned. I thought it should betwo books; they said fine. In 1989, such things could be dreamed of. When it finally came out in 2001, they weren’t even publishing art history books. It was probably an act of charity [that theywent ahead and published it]. [If I had to do it all over today,]I would never write a 700-page dissertation and would advise mystudents not to do that.”Another scholar said,“In my class of’94-’95, every one of twelve [Ph.D.s] did publish theirdissertations as books.”