Focused discussion with younger scholars  (Page 2/4)

Another question this raises is how advisors should guide students with respect to choosing a dissertationtopic. One scholar said that she would be hard pressed to advise students to do a dissertation on a topic that she knows publisherswon’t be interested in publishing.

This is a particularly vexing problem in the field of art history, which, over time, has become increasinglyspecialized. For emerging subfields to move forward, important scholarly work in these areas (the audience for which will, bydefinition, be limited), must find an outlet for publication. One scholar, working in an important emerging subfield of art history,was told by publishers that his topic was“outside of our list.”He realized that, for his work to be published, some publishersomewhere would have to be convinced to begin publishing in this subfield. He and several colleagues (also working in this area)collectively approached an editor at a university press who was willing to consider publishing in this subfield. The key to makingthis happen, though, was applying for funding from a large arts-oriented foundation to underwrite the costs of publishing aninitial wave of titles in this area. Now, most scholars working in this subfield are sending their manuscripts to thispublisher.

To reach broader audiences, scholars say that publishers are increasingly interested in publishinginterdisciplinary work, which to some is not necessarily a bad thing. As one scholar put it,“The market is driving the emergence of cross-disciplinary books and books that cut across thetraditional sub-disciplines of art history. It’s market driven, but it’s very much in keeping with the mood of the moment [in art history scholarship].”

The relative“Value”Of different types of scholarly work, in relation to advancing the field and to tenure and promotion

Virtually all of the younger scholars agreed that publishing monographs in book form is indispensable to thefield of art history. As one person put it,“[In a comprehensive work of art history scholarship,]there are hundreds of pages and hundreds of footnotes all with pictures that cannot simply be putinto a journal article.”Add to this the importance of high quality reproduction of visual images for art history scholarship and it isclear that the monograph remains an essential vehicle for disseminating scholarship in the field.

Moreover, at most institutions of higher education, art history scholars are expected to producesingle-author monographs in order to be considered for tenure and promotion. Single-author monographs tend to far outweigh all otherforms of scholarship insofar as criteria for advancement are concerned. Comments such as the following were typical:

“When it comes to measuring your scholarship, [review committees]still talk about your first book, your second book–these are the big milestones. It doesn’t matter whether you have 30 articles or 3 articles, people don’t measure it that way even though the amount of effort you’ve put into four articles can equal one book.”