Category: Book Projects
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A New Project
My last book, The First Scottish Enlightenment, was published in February and since then Covid, lockdown, and their attendant upheavals have meant that I’ve had very little time to blog or write anything publicly about my next steps. Even if I’d had the time, I’m not sure I’d have known what to say. For several…
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Book Launch Tomorrow!
Last week, I had the joy of receiving the first copies of The First Scottish Enlightenment from OUP: This week marks the first of what I hope will be several book launch events around and furth of Scotland. If you’re at all interested, please do join me and my colleagues Scott Hames and Michael Shaw…
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Post-Book Pleasures
One of the nicest things about having submitted my book manuscript has been the suddenly-restored space in which to simply read, think, and tentatively write about new ideas. I’m already working on my latest research project – a study of carved stones in Scotland – but that’s both long-term and expansive in its remit, so…
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Week -4: The Book is Finished!
. . . and it’s away! Shortly before midnight last night I hit send on the e-mail which delivered a full manuscript of The First Scottish Enlightenment to my editor at OUP. Alert readers may have noticed that my actual submission deadline was the end of July rather than the end of August. They may also…
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Week 8: A Complete Draft
I began the research project which ultimately led to this book in the summer of 2014 and had been thinking about it for a year or more before that, so it’s almost hard to believe that last week saw me write the final chapter (an unexpected addition which I only realised I needed quite late…
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Week 13: The Best-Laid Schemes . . .
Burns’s “To a Mouse” (1785) is one of those poems so culturally ubiquitous – in Scotland anyway – that its lines have become verbal tics or pieces of linguistic shorthand like Chinese Chengyu. I was reflecting on this while mentally composing the present blog post. A little less than a month ago The Historian and I moved…
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Week 22: Strikes and Snow
This is the first week in which I’ve fallen behind my completion schedule. It’s all the more strange given that the week which has just gone by, on first glance, would seem to have been the ideal stretch of time in which to plow ahead with the book project. Why? Well, I’ve somewhat sophistically convinced…
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Week 25: A Chapter Down
We are currently in week 25. I used to organise my desk journal and the other paraphernalia of scheduling by weeks of term or semester, but that’s now been supplanted by the overarching countdown of the book manuscript and, by that highly specific calendar, we are twenty-five weeks away from hand-off to OUP. I’m now…
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Scheduling the Book
I survive in academia with the help of calendars and schedules: the paper diary that used to be enough to keep me organised when I was a student has expanded into a Google calendar, an increasingly complicated desk journal, and multiple tables and Gantt charts, but the principle remains the same. My latest schedule, though,…
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Demography, Statistics, and the Cultural Historian
These days if I’m forced to put myself in a sub-disciplinary box, I usually say that I’m a cultural historian. This is less because I’m an adherent of the Burkean New Cultural History (or any other theoretical agenda, for that matter) than because it seems to offer a comfortable basket into which I can fit…
Kelsey Jackson Williams 