Books! From Proposal to Print
A Roundtable Luncheon for Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Students
Content
Join an informal, nuts-and-bolts conversation for those working on or planning to write a book - covering the full arc from shaping a proposal and approaching presses to navigating reviews, revisions, contracts, and production. This moderated roundtable will include a few prepared prompts, with lots of discussion and time for questions.
The timing of this event is intentional: with SBS mutual mentoring grants due a week later (March 1), this luncheon is designed to help colleagues form (or refine) book-writing mutual mentoring groups before the deadline. This is a great event for faculty, graduate students, or staff planning, proposing, drafting, revising, or trying to finish a book (or advising someone who is).
Panelists:
- Burcu Baykurt (Communication) – Assistant Professor studying the social and cultural implications of digital technologies, especially infrastructures, governance, and inequality. She is the author of Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism, forthcoming with University of California Press in May 2026, and co-editor (with Victoria de Grazia) of Soft-Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st-Century Global Order, published by Columbia University Press.
- Nicholas (Nick) Caverly (Anthropology) – Assistant Professor whose work examines racism, space, and justice through ethnographic and archival methods His first book, Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures, is published with Stanford University Press
- Kathy Roberts Forde (Journalism) – Co-edits the book series Journalism & Democracy at UMass Press, helping first-time book authors develop proposals and understand the university press publishing. Professor of Journalism whose research spans democracy and the press, the First Amendment, and book/print culture. Her book, Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment, was published by University of Massachusetts Press.
- Asheesh Siddique (History) - Associate professor whose research focuses on early America / early modern Europe. His first book The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World was published by Yale University Press in 2024.
Sponsored by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the Institute for Social Science Research.