Episode 04: "What is it all for?" The challenge of finding a writing motivation after the first book with Professor Martin Kavka

And in 2008, it won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought for the best book in that subfield published between 2004 and 2008. He has also co-edited four books, notably with Zachary Brederman and David Novak, The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy, The Modern Era. And later in 2023, the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish Unsettling Jewish Knowledge, Text Contingency Desire, which Kafka co-edited with Anne C. Daly and Lita Levy. That sounds fascinating. Maybe we'll get a chance to touch on what that's about. In addition to having written dozens of articles and reviews, Kafka co-edited, along with Aileen Kalbian, the Journal of Religious Ethics between 2011 and 2021. So thank you for being with us today, Martin. It's a great honor and privilege to be speaking with you, Rachel.

As we discussed when you and I were chatting the other day, you have the kind of academic career and CV that I think some academics would likely see and envy. That is for many reasons. But one of those reasons is that you are a full professor, which I think you've been for a while. And you achieve that having written one single authored monograph. You've edited many more books and written dozens of articles and reviews. But maybe you can speak to this, your status and the path and how that worked for you. I'm happy to do so. So as you said, the book that... from my revised dissertation appeared in 2004. And in 2007, my fiancé at the time suddenly passed away of a heart attack.

And in the months after that, I really didn't have a desire to write ever again. And I guess personally, there was a kind of theodicy issue, right? I had... Gone to graduate school, gotten the PhD, written everything I could in the thought that pursuing those signs of my intelligence would lead to life success. And yet, in the fall of 2007, I was the unhappiest I'd ever been. And I began to think, what is it all for? But I knew I had to keep publishing in some way if I were to keep my job. And so basically what I've done for the last 15, 16 years is I've taken on assignments for friends. People ask me to write an article or do a book review and I'll say yes.

I say yes to a lot of things in part because I don't have a desire that's pretty much rooted in my own research program. So that's how I've gone through my career since then. As you've noted, I've published a lot of articles. I've published a lot of book reviews. In 2013, I took a job running Jewish studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. And when I took that job, I was told that I had enough published at that time that I could be appointed to the rank of full professor at that institution. And I went through expedited research. tenure and promotion process, and i received the rank of full professor in october of my year there. That winter, I had massive seasonal affective disorder, and i was barely able to function.

I made it through the academic year. But I was on leave without pay from florida state university at that time, and i came back to fsu at the end of that year. So that would have been the summer of 2014. And I went up for promotion to full again at that time that was part of the deal of coming back. And I had, since my previous promotion, about two dozen articles, these edited volumes, and I was able to be promoted to full prof. I mean, basically, my friends who came to me and asked me to write things and asked me to edit things, they are the ones who are responsible for my success. And as you note, a very odd CV. I don't think I...

deserve much of the credit for my rank, but people came to me and took care of me by asking me to write things because they knew it would take my mind off of my own unhappiness. And I'm deeply indebted to them. Thank you. I'm wondering then, is this the focus on articles and edited volumes? Is that something you do or you're able even to advise people younger academics who might not be as interested in the book. Many academics we know in the humanities actually love writing books or it gets them very excited. But I imagine we have listeners who are thinking, that sounds great. That actually sounds like it fits more with the kind of writing and work they want to do. Is this advice you can offer to follow that kind of path?

So I think that everyone has their own idiosyncratic career and everyone works in an idiosyncratic ecosystem. stories you hear about higher ed in scare quotes. I think we need to look at those institution by institution. But I think there are some portable rules that are worth noting. The first is that no one should take a promotion ladder as an opportunity for hazing, even if we were hazed by our own promotion ladders or by our own dissertation writing processes in one way or another. The tenure and promotion process is, to me, a department, five other academics, basically holding an academic unit accountable for its bylaws. Some of those bylaws are idiosyncratic. You know, you have to have a book in order to be promoted to associate professor.

You have to have a second book in order to be promoted to full professor. And it's not quite clear to me that the book is the only way to show excellence. Articles are a way of showing excellence. Outside reviewers can talk about that excellence when they write their reviews of people who are coming up for promotion. And I think that if people want to have a broader set of paths to promotion, then they need to start conversations in their own units about their bylaws and about the paragraphs in those bylaws that are about promotion and tenure. And I think that if they do that, they'll find that their deans will be deeply supportive, actually. No one... enjoys denying people tenure or turning down files that seek promotion to full prof and i think that as long as a unit can talk about why this path to promotion shows excellence that's not that hard it's easy for units to broaden their criteria by which people can get to the top of the promotion ladder in a timely fashion and even in a quick fashion and

As we all know, once you reach full prof, that means that people can ask you to do a whole bunch of service tasks without any guilt. So we should look at our colleagues who are good at those tasks and try and get them promoted to full prof as quickly as possible so that we can make good use of their skills in that regard. TNP guidelines might be revised to be more inclusive for those who are more comfortable in the article writing mode. You know, this is something with conversation and organizing, we might be in a position to change, even those of us who are assistant professor level. Absolutely. I don't think there's any reason why that can't be done. I think it is likely that in some units and some institutions, there'll be

be some roadblocks you know again people say you know when i was in graduate school or when i was on the tenure track these are what the rules are but i think that the rules that were in place in the 90s and 2000s those are different than the rules that were in place in the 50s and 60s there's no logic that says that the current language in units bylaws about what it takes to get tenured or what it what it takes to get promoted to the rank of full professor that those are etched in stone, that those are eternally valid, that they can't be changed. That's just false, it seems to me. You used the word desire earlier. I think when you were talking about your own writing books, and I know that's a word in your forthcoming edited volume, it seems like part of what you're reminding us is that there often does need to be a desire that goes along with the writing of a book, and that in the absence of that desire,

feeling, that desire to tell a certain story, to do research and get it out there, it can be harder to move the book along. So did you feel more of that desire to tell a story, to write a book earlier in your career? I suppose when you were telling us about your path, that might have been implied, but what would you say to that? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I wrote my dissertation because I wanted to make my committee members happy. I wanted them to like me. I wanted them to acknowledge my intelligence in some way. And the second book was always hard because there was no committee demanding work in some way. I mean, I have half of the second book written, as I always like to joke to people.

It's a different half every year. I sort of tinker with it now and then when I can. But it was easier for me to write articles because I was always writing for someone. an editor of a special issue, a book review editor, someone organizing a conference who wanted to put an issue together. And I ended up writing something because I didn't want to let a friend down. And with the book, you know, some weird, reified, abstracted thing, there was not really someone and there isn't really someone whom I feel I might be letting down by not writing it. That's been part of the challenge. And luckily, the bylaws of my unit and my going to Lehigh and then coming back allowed me to get around that.

But it's a really hard thing. Writing is a kind of forming a connection with people whom you don't know, whom you will only meet 10 or 15 years later when they say, oh, I found your book in the library. It really helped me when I was preparing for comps or something like this. And it's important to think of that audience. And it's important to think of when you – it's important to think when you write about who are your current friends, who are your past friends, who are your future friends whom you've never met. And I think that with book number two, that that's just really hard to imagine. And it's part of why in so many subfields people have accountability groups in their writing.

And they're – The words that you're writing aren't for the people in your accountability group necessarily, although I do know some groups that are like that. But at least you're accountable to these people for getting some words on the page by this time, by the time the clock hits four o'clock. And so that's really important. And I think that we really need to do work in making scholarship personal. There are lots of ways to do that, but At the most mundane level, it's that we need to think of persons when we write, and that makes writing easier. I haven't been able to do this for book number two, but I have friends who have, and I'm really jealous of them for being able to pull that off so well.

It's something I think you did really beautifully in the introduction of your first book. And I think it comes up again in the conclusion. Was that your way? Was that the kind of thinking of your reader, your friends that you have in mind? Yeah, in part, that's true, right? So I'm a scholar of Jewish philosophy, a field that is known for being particularly abstruse. I have had the privilege of being able to present my work to people who didn't think that I was merely talking jargon when I spoke. But when I began my current job at Florida State, one of the first courses I taught was a modern Jewish thought class. And I quickly learned that that I just couldn't speak in the way that I had been writing while I was in graduate school.

And so when I was developing the intro and the conclusion for the 2004 book, I quickly realized that if I wasn't going to think of myself as writing for someone, I wasn't going to be very clear. And if you're not clear in the intro, no one's going to read another chapter. And so I structured the intro differently. and the conclusion as letters. It's a D dash, a friend named Dirk von der Horst who teaches in California. People sometimes think that it's my teacher, David Novak, to whom I'm writing, but that's not the case. Many people have names beginning with D after all. But Dirk, not a Jewish studies person, outside my subfield, and his outsideness Writing to him sort of pushed me to be clearer than I would have been otherwise.

And so, again, it's a way that thinking of friends and thinking about people who won't automatically know what I'm talking about has been really helpful for me, not only in getting words on a page, but also pushing to me as clear as I could be at that time and as clear as I can be now. Often when I write now, I think about current and former undergraduate students. I write for them. They're the people who are living in my head, even though I don't think they read anything I write. But if I have them in mind, I'm sure that I'm not writing anything about Jewish philosophy that 19-year-olds across America will read. But I'm getting closer to that mark than I would otherwise.

Yeah, that's a great strategy. Now that you articulated it, I realize I guess I do something similar where I have a friend, Jay, in academia, and I I'm often telling him when I'm starting a new article or book. And so emailing him, I've realized to tell him, oh, I'm starting this article on X, Y, and Z is when I am most clear about it. And then I end up sort of cutting and pasting from that email into the project. At moments like that, we write abstracts at the end of the process, but it It's often helpful to write abstracts at the beginning when we can imagine broader kinds of audiences and imagine outsiders as reading or hearing us. And that's often really, really helpful.

So I'm wondering how you think about editing. As we mentioned, you've edited four books and some of us teach at institutions where the tenure and promotion committees seem to devalue this, but but actually edited volumes are often really helpful and useful. What kind of knowledge production or sort of service to students and colleagues do you feel like you're doing with that kind of work of edited volumes? It is the case that edited volumes are not always legible. They're especially not legible to our colleagues who work in the sciences and the social sciences for whom even a a kind of currency that a multiple author edited volume, an edited volume with nine or 10 essays in it or 18 to 20 essays doesn't always have.

Although I do find that colleagues in other units respect the genre of the handbook, the companion, and that kind of edited volume that's become so popular over the last 15 years. Let me say something first before I get to the question about knowledge production, about how I got into editing. For me, it started as a kind of inferiority complex, right? I never thought I was so great in my field, but I did read the Chicago Manual of Style cover to cover when I was a graduate student, when I was copy editing and indexing books written by faculty in my department at Rice University. And I loved it. I love the Chicago Manual of Style. And if there's ever some version of Chicago jeopardy that is about that, I will enter and I will win for 400 days in a row, I think.

But I also then wanted to use those skills as a way to sustain the reputation of my teachers. So the first two books I co-edited, one was a collection of essays by my teacher, David Novak, and one was a collection of essays about the work of my teacher, Edith Wishigrod, who supervised my dissertation at Rice. And Then that editing experience led into having acquisitions editors come up to me to take up other kinds of projects. So, for example, the Cambridge History volume that you mentioned, and then a later volume that came out with Indiana University Press about political theology, and then the volume with Penn coming out later this calendar year. And I think that the benefit of those edited volumes is that

it helps scholars deal with the limits of their training. One of the things that happens when you go from graduate school to a job, or when you realize that you have to give an introductory lecture in something that you took a class on, maybe in graduate school, but maybe an undergrad, and you have to learn this all is that you have to know so much more about your subfield and your field than you ever thought you did when you were a graduate student. And edited volumes and the act of editing other people is a way to gain that knowledge. I edited the Journal of Religious Ethics for a decade with my wonderful colleague Aline Kalbian. To the extent that I'm a scholar of an ethical turn in Jewish philosophy, I fit that, but there's a whole bunch of stuff in religious ethics that I don't know.

I don't know very much about just war, for example. Augustine on neighbor love is not something I'm particularly expert in. But when you put out four issues of the Journal of Religious Ethics a year, you gain competence, confidence, even expertise that you more than osmosis when you're correcting other people's improper use of semicolons. And I'm really, really grateful for that. But people should read issues of journals from front cover to back cover. And I think it's a good thing to do in terms of increasing networking, increasing knowledge, and being able to give an introductory lecture in a class in a really efficient way. You're so right. I noticed the same thing. Even when I'm actually just reviewing journal article manuscripts, I'm suddenly speaking knowledgeably about topics that I didn't really know before.

I'm definitely learning through that process of reviewing. And I guess it sounds like you've also become more confident about your own skills as an editor. I think that my skills as editor have sort of gone down a bit since I became chair of my department. There's just a time crunch there. But certainly there's the ability to read an essay, copy edit, being able to send comments back to an author about where something could be clearer, where a sentence might trip a reader up. And when you do that over and over again for a decade or if you're editing books, you know, over a longer haul or maybe even over a briefer haul, that just becomes part of your skill set. And it's important, it seems to me, to have that.

And not just because it makes you feel better, not because you have a broader array of subfields that you know, but it's a skill set that means that you can make other people's work the best that it possibly can. And again, it's a way of returning that act of friendship or passing it on, if you want to use that kind of language, that is really, I think, how academia works and how academia works at its best. So true. It is kind of at the center of a lot of academic friendships. Publishing is part of the game of getting tenured and getting promoted, and it's important to think of publishing in that way. But to me, publishing isn't necessarily important as a CV line, but publishing is important simply because thinking of work

what you write is eventually being published helps you get that audience in mind and it makes the writing better. Speaking of also the work being visible, you and I have chatted a little bit about self-promotion and publicizing our work. I'm curious how you see, since you've been in this business for a while, changes in how academics go about promoting their work and whether you think this is effective or helpful make sense or detrimental so i got my phd in 2000, and i don't think that people were doing book launches at that time. Or if you were, you were someone who had the level of fame where you could just, you know, have your agent call up the 92nd street Y, and you could have a talk there tied to your book coming out.

But now, I think whenever anyone does a book, there's a launch perhaps hosted by a friend at another institution, and that's new. I don't begrudge my colleagues that. I do sometimes wonder whether they feel that they have to do it. And I don't think that we're obligated to do that. It's not clear to me that a book launch is really going to make a book sell more copies. Royalty rates for academic books, especially for first-time authors, are so low that I'm not sure that would amount to much of anything anyway. But I do think that... Book launches are helpful in two ways. One, again, they sort of create these networks of friendship and they get us thinking about our audiences. And maybe we weren't all trained to do that in graduate school or even when we were pursuing tenure.

Maybe we were in a mindset where we thought we just had to show that we were smart. And the structure of the book launch in which two or three people respond to a book, I think, gets us out of that mindset. in a way that a dissertation defense doesn't. Two, I think there are some fields of inquiry where there are more senior positions that are advertised through the academic job market in a given year. That has to do with donor gifts. And for people who are ambitious enough to want those jobs, and I wouldn't say that we have to be, but some people are, That the kind of book launch or other kinds of hustle is helpful for already being a known quantity when one applies for those kinds of positions.

I mean, I'm very happy to have a position that is fully paid for by Florida taxpayers. It's my favorite kind of thing. I would never want to be anywhere else than a position like that where I had to be at a public institution. But I know that other people have other kinds of desires, and that means that the hustle of the launch and other kinds of things is really integral to their desired career paths. I would also say that for people who are precarious, that the book launch is a way perhaps of minimizing that precarity. And for those people, anything they can do to feel less precarious, not just be less precarious, but feel less precarious, is deeply important and those of us with privilege when we say yes to talking about their books at these book launch events it's really important for those scholars that we make them feel as equal as important as those of us with privilege feel and actually are yeah your your discussion there of of the feelings around these events and the book launch, you know, makes me think

Because I'm not at that stage yet. That part of the reason too is it makes it more fun, you know, possibly and possibly makes that book coming out more about community. As you said, you sometimes have respondents there, friends or mentors speaking about the book. So it seems like there's a potential to make the birth of that book a somewhat community type of event and more fun, which seems worthwhile. Yeah. A book launches at its best a book reveal party, right? Right. I mean, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up for a variety of reasons. Shy, gay. I had a terrible stutter when I was a child and a teenager. And I really didn't learn how to have friends until I was late in college and then in graduate school.

And to the extent that I'm a functioning adult, it's because... People were patient with me at that time in my life, and they trusted that I would somehow catch up. And so my friends in academia are the most important people in my life, except for my spouse. And I just think that we don't talk enough about how academic careers, academic success is really a function of those kinds of friendships and what we've done for each other along the way after a graduate seminar or graduation. an email that says can you look this article over and tell me how i might improve it or in various accountability groups that people at all kinds of ranks have and i think that the book launch is a way of really acknowledging how academic labor happens it happens in a collective group and it doesn't mean anything without acknowledging that and the book launch at its best as a way of acknowledging that it's just honesty in some ways but again

I don't want to say that people should run themselves ragged in order to have book launches. You're not going to get huge royalty checks as a result of it most of the time, I think. One of the questions we're asking all guests is if there's something you wish you had known earlier in your academic career about writing or publishing that you think would be helpful. I wish I'd realized very early on that the life of the mind was was about far more than acquiring knowledge. I think that as a shy, gay, stuttering kid who didn't have many friends, I thought, well, this is how I'll show you people. I'll just be smarter than the rest of you. And I think that led to a huge sort of narcissist element in my personality that I still see on occasion, probably more than on occasion, if I'm going to be honest.

And But that's not how academic life goes. You're in a seminar room. You're talking to people. People are very politely telling you that, no, this text can be understood in this other way. And it's just as profitable and just as interesting when you read it that way. And there should be a kind of awe of the people around you at the seminar table in the conference room. Look, The most exciting part of an academic panel at a conference is always the Q&A. It's not the paper. It's the Q&A. And that says something about where the joy in intellectual life is to be found. I learned that about a decade later. I'm sorry. I began to learn that about a decade later than I ought to have.

And I really wish that... it had been drummed into me a bit more bluntly when I was in graduate school. That's not to say that my teachers didn't do something they ought to do. I'm sure that they tried. And I was just not listening very well at the time. But that's a reason to make it more blunt, it seems to me. I really agree. And the relationship part of what you're saying, I also felt like I was really late to learn that. But it was when I was in my postdocs, maybe, that it especially became clear to me that some of my friends had in grad school done a much better job of using their network. I mean, even to write their dissertation, I mean, to actually physically be writing with other people so it was less lonely.

And then as you say, sharing pieces with friends and getting feedback. And I didn't realize how collaborative other people had made what was often a really lonely and overwhelming experience of trying to write that dissertation. So I do think that it's possible for people to be happy writing alone, right? Being alone was sort of all I knew when I was writing my dissertation or was a big chunk of what I knew. And so I could sit in my apartment, write a chapter, and it was okay. But at a certain time, that just wasn't enough for me as I went on. And so I think that, again, I don't want to mandate – for people how they should write or how they should think about their own writing preferences.

But I do think we should license people to experiment, right? Maybe an accountability group will work for you. And maybe if it doesn't necessarily make you write faster, maybe it makes you feel better when you write. And that's important too. Graduate school is not easy. Graduate school in the humanities is especially not easy in this day and age. And we should, grab on to any technique we can to make it less alienating for us and for the people around us, right? Many of us have spouses, children, and, you know, they know what it's like. They know all too well what it's like. And we should grab on to these techniques as a way of caring for them and not just for ourselves. Yeah.

Another question we're asking folks is about a writing practice or habit that is working well for you. So I've never had writing practices or habits that have worked especially well for me. I'm not an outliner. I don't have an accountability group. Nothing like that has really been part of my writing process. As someone who's been a bit too much of a workaholic over the course of his career, basically what gets me writing is I'm late with someone. I owe them something. I want to be known as a person who others can count on. I'm sorry, on whom others can count. Sorry about that. My sixth grade grammar teacher would be yelling at me now. And I just don't want to let people down.

Other people are counting on you so that an issue can get out on time, so that a book can get out in a timely fashion. Because there's that other author in that edited volume who's going to be up for tenure and needs that attention. publication out or at least in press. So you have to write in a timely fashion. And for me, it's that fear of letting other people down that has been the best motor of my own writing. That's not particularly noble, I think, right? I don't think fear is a good way to go through life, but it's worked for me so far. So it's what I know how to do best. Yeah, I really relate to that. We're scrambling to submit...

Proposals for a conference that you and I both usually attend and getting – writing the abstract with my fellow participants has finally gotten me to articulate what this article is I'm working on is actually about. So it can be very helpful. Martin, do you have anything else you want to share or say? This has all been great about writing or publishing. I think I'll just repeat something that I said earlier. that, – In the press, at least, we talk about higher ed and academic life as if it were about expertise. And it is. But I think that we don't talk about enough, or at least the journalists writing about higher ed don't write enough, about how we're a community. We're a network of friends.

We're a network of people who care for our students, for our friends' students. And we're a site of care for each other. In a way that not every workplace is. I think that people think that academia is a special workplace, not unlike others, for political reasons. But it's really a special workplace because it's a place where we can care for each other. And that care translates into professional success much of the time. Not all of the time. It should all of the time. It doesn't. But much of the time it does. We don't talk about that. And I wish we would do that more, really bolster public talk about academia as a site of relationships and what happens in those relationships. I think if we do that, that people will report on higher ed with more honesty and people will understand us more and some people will resent us less.

Really true. I'm thinking about that in relation to editing stuff. because you and I were talking about that and thinking about the edited volumes, how it seems like in the best cases, there is that kind of sense of community or at least friendship between the co-editors and then possibly with the contributors. Now, the reality that I've sometimes experienced or heard about from friends is that the edited volume is super late and the participants are getting annoyed and sometimes writing that kind of email to the editors or co-editors. And I'm wondering if you've actually been able to do a better job or have found ways to make edit volumes a site of some of that kind of community. I think that the temporality of publishing is a really complex issue and it's a problematic one.

So the one that's coming out this fall comes from a year at the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania. where all the fellows were there in the 2016-17 academic year and the volumes coming out this this fall that's a long time from fellowship year to publication. But, you know, it takes time to get people to write their best stuff. It takes time for reviewers to say, hey, editors, you should have thought about this stuff too. It takes time to write an introduction that shows how all the essays fit together in a way. And I think that that's work that is good and important. It just means that it takes a long time to get credit, right? I mean, when a volume comes out six years after a fellowship period ends, it's up for tenure basically at that time, right?

Given most academic timelines. And it's a real issue about how to get things out faster. But I don't know how to solve that. Sometimes I suspect that if journals in various subfields could persuade their publishers to grant them a higher annual page budget, that much of what we now see as edited volumes would appear as special issues of journals. And given institutional subscriptions, those actually might be more broadly accessible to a community of scholars and students of scholars and – present scholars and future scholars than would otherwise be the case. But having edited books with multiple university presses, I'm not sure that I want that genre of book to end. But again, I know that other people have different relationships to time than I do.

But it's a really complex issue, Rachel. Yeah. And I know we asked about best or any kind of good writing habits or practices, but because of the work you do, Editing and editing for friends, too. I'm wondering if you've learned how to best edit or, you know, I'm still figuring this out with both students and friends, that constructive criticism that is not, you know, not mean or is really, you know, in the interest of making this the best piece of writing and scholarship, but also points out the problems. Are there things you've learned about editing? Mainly with undergraduates actually, right? So the easiest piece to edit and the easiest way to learn about editing is to have a whole bunch of undergraduate papers that are written at the last minute, right?

And so you comment back to them and you show them – you basically hold up a mirror to them about how they are selling themselves short, that they're not putting their own best foot forward, right? we should tell all of our students that what they're thinking, what they have to say is deeply important, that it's a contribution. But we isolate what the best stuff of that is. And then we show them how it's not being sustained from paragraph to paragraph, or there's a part here where it falls apart. And you learn a lot about your own writing that way, right? Where you end up doing the same things, like We're all that undergraduate writing something at the last minute right Because I write out of fear.

I'm always that undergraduate writing at the last minute. And you learn about how to carry your voice from paragraph to paragraph, from section to section of an article. Maybe if I ever publish another book again, from chapter to chapter of a book, through showing students how they're not doing it, even though they have such important and valuable things to say about their Whoever is on the syllabus about whom they are writing at that time. Grading is academics least favorite thing to do. But when you're grading a six page paper that you've constructed well, so that it is something that maximizes a student's own voice, it can teach you so much about how to make your own writing and your own thinking better. I've found that too.

I'm always recognizing myself in my students' mistakes. with writing. This was really great. Thank you so much, Martin, for making time for us. I know it's a really busy time of the semester. Thank you so much. It's been a real joy. And I've learned a lot about myself through the questions that you've asked. And I hope that the audience also has moments of insight as a result of listening to our conversation. Definitely. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at writingitpod and subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.