PK: Navigating Collaborative Work on Edited Volumes

This workshop, designed for doctoral candidates at all stages of their study and postdocs, offers an in-depth examination of challenges, pitfalls and proven strategies in collaborative work on edited volumes.

Work on collaboratively edited volumes is challenging and time-sensitive.  Final edited content has to be delivered by a certain date and from the outset of the undertaking, each co-editor must manage multiple responsibilities in the areas of organization, monitoring, communication and editing.  In this three-hour workshop, attendees will be able to discuss and brainstorm creative solutions to common problems.  Of course given the large number of stakeholders—co-editors, publisher and contributors, appropriate communication with clear deadlines and good follow-up is essential. 

Specific points include:

-Input on the differences between editing a special issue and a volume.
-Prepare sample road maps of what needs to happen when and how much time one needs to plan for the various steps, i.e. different road maps for editing special issues/volumes with different levels of review that are typical of different kinds of presses (i.e. German without peer review vs. US/UK peer reviewed etc.).
-Selection of contributors (open call vs. specific recruitment; recruitment of "big names").
-Language and proofreading.
-Editors as authors: introduction, conclusion, own contribution?
-Accompanying workshops.
-The editor's worst nightmare: overrunning of deadlines.

The workshop will combine lecture and group-work.

//Dr. Birte Christ and PD Dr. Janne Mende

Dr. Birte Christ teaches American Literature and Cultural Studies at the English Department of Justus Liebig University. She is research assistant to Prof. Dr. Greta Olson. Dr. Birte Christ has been working at Justus Liebig University since October 2009 and has previously held positions at the University of Bonn and the University of Freiburg. Her teaching and research interests include law and literature, transmedial narratology, women’s studies, middlebrow literature and culture, and approaches to teaching American literature and culture.

Dr. Birte Christ is the author of Modern Domestic Fiction: Popular Feminism, Mass-Market Magazines, and Middle-Class Culture, 1905-1925 (Winter 2012) and has co-edited three volumes: a collection of collaborative essays on the state of the field of American Studies, American Studies / Shifting Gears (Winter 2010; with Michael Butter, Christian Kloeckner and Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche), a more „popular“ book in German on the impact of 9/11 on American politics and culture, 9/11. Kein Tag, der die Welt veränderte (Schöningh 2011; with Michael Butter and Patrick Keller), and Obama and the Paradigm Shift – Measuring Change (Winter 2012; with Greta Olson). A special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies on “Poetry and Law” is forthcoming 2017 (ed. with Stefanie Müller), as is a comparative volume entitled Death Sentences (ed. with Ève Morisi). Recent essays have appeared in Narrative, American Literary History, and Post-45. She is currently finishing her second book (Habilitation) on representations of capital punishment and their racial politics from the 1840s to the 1990s. She also works on further publications on poetry and law (with Stefanie Müller) and is preparing a larger project on middlebrow transnationalism (with Faye Hammill).

Dr. Janne Mende is Senior Researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen’s Institute for Political Science, Department of International Relations. Dr. Janne Mende is currently conducting her DFG-funded research project about “Business Actors beyond Public and Private: Authority, Legitimacy and Responsibility in the United Nations Human Rights Regime” at the University of Giessen. Prior to that, she was holding a visiting fellowship at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences, and she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Development and Decent Work at the University of Kassel.

Besides business responsibility for human rights and its meaning for authority, legitimacy, and notions of public and private, her current research focuses on methods of qualitative data analysis in international organizations, global governance and international political theory.

In her PhD thesis, she analyzed liberal and communitarian approaches to collective rights, discussing the chances and challenges of an indigenous human right to culture and identity. A previous study on universalism, cultural relativism and female genital mutilation/cutting was published in 2011.