Publishing from one's PhD thesis

[the_lady_lily]

Context - I am a PhD student in a humanities discipline, and, like everyone else in this age of publish or perish, I am looking to my scholarly laurels. In thinking about ways to do this, I've come across what seems to be a bit of a US/UK cultural difference, and so I wanted to seek the general a_a opinion

Comments

[pansette]

Specifying your discipline might help. These things vary from one field to the next.

[the_lady_lily]

I wanted to try and keep the discussion open rather than shut it down into discipline talk, as it struck me as a generally interesting question; I'm in Classics, for what it's worth.

[owl_of_minerva]

I'm in humanities, in Canada, with a US PhD; I've been getting advice on this myself from folks in the US and in Canada -- folks seem to have a sense that one chapter is fine (or, say, up to about 20% of the work). A friend who just had her proposal accepted had published two articles out of her diss already & had the sense that she was coming up against the limit of what would have ben ok -- but hey, her proposal was accepted, so it's all good.

(I think this is also repeated in William Germano's books, From Dissertation to Book and Getting it Published [those titles are off the top of my head; I might not be remembering them exactly]). You want to be open about this in the book proposal, of course.

Edit: I also seem to recall this advice coming up in a panel of Canadian publishers that I posted about here.

[the_lady_lily]

I've already read the Germanos (one of the places the idea came from in the first place!), but thanks for the references. I'll chase down the Canadian publishers with interest.

Maybe the tag needs expanding to UK/UK/Canadian differences...

[owl_of_minerva]

One more brief datapoint, for what it's worth: I'm just looking back at another friend's cover letter for his book proposal -- out of seven chapters he's published articles based on two of them, and he is getting serious interest in his ms. from both UK and US publishers right now.

Anyway. I'll happily join you in that stiff G&T.

[non_trivial]

UK (humanities) PhD student data point: From what we've been told, if you are looking for an academic position after your PhD, these days it is pretty much expected that you will have an article based on a thesis chapter either published or forthcoming when you apply for jobs. This will not prejudice your chances of getting a book contract.

[knut_hamson]

I'm in the humanities in the US, and it's common to publish a chapter from the thesis, sometimes even two. As Owl points out, you don't want to publish more than 20% of your thesis. But publishing one chapter in a top journal may even work as a selling point for a publisher to pick up the whole project.

[lareinenoire]

Pretty much echoing what everybody else has said. I've had two sections (not entire chapters) of my (humanities) dissertation accepted for publication, and was told this would not be a problem for a potential MS. And employers do expect some sign of publication these days.