June, 2023 Research Update

Amici!  It is now July!

Indeed, you may have noticed it is rather far into July.  Once again, by way of apology, here is a picture of a cat:

The reason I delayed the update was to wait until I could report that I had submitted the sample chapters (ch. 1, 3, 4, 10 and 11, plus the introduction) to our target publisher (Oxford University Press) for review.

And I did that today!

Now the process will move over to the press.  First, the editor, who I spoke with back in January, will look over the project and decide if he wants to proceed.  Hopefully the interest he expressed back then to look at more of the project is still there.  Assuming it is, he'll then arrange to send the chapters out for peer review, where other academics will take a look at them and give him feedback.  That process, I am told, usually takes 2-3 months.

Assuming the feedback is positive, the editor then takes the book project to the editorial board, which decides if they're going to publish it.  It's also possible to end up needing to do revisions before going back to the editorial board at this stage, possibly with another round of peer review.  Of course it's also possible at every stage the press decides that the project isn't what they want, at which point we start over with a new publisher.

(There is a good summary of the whole process here).

In the meantime, since this could be a drawn out process, I'm hoping to get work done on a few projects (a co-authored article on Roman strategy, a single-author article on the dilectus and possibly a book chapter on the ancient world in video games).  Ideally I'd like to get at least one of these projects well underway before the school year proper starts in mid-August.

Speaking of which, I'm teaching both the Ancient Mediterranean World and US Military History surveys in the Fall.  My understanding is that I'll probably be assigned a TA for each, which should help my writing schedule a bit, but it's still very much a full teaching load and US Military History is a new course for me, so I'll have to write a syllabus for it.  Luckily there is very much a standard textbook everyone uses (Millett, Maslowski and Fies, For the Common Defense), so I can build the course around that.

I was going to link my recent thread on the pectoral, the armor of poorer Roman soldiers in Polybius (third/second century BC), but Twitter is currently blocking non-registered users from reading in its continued race into irrelevance, so instead here is a link to a ThreadReader of it.  I also put in an appearance on The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg; I know that may be a bit much of a political venue (Goldberg is a conservative pundit) for some of you, but I thought it was a good conversation.  As you may have noticed, I tend to swing pretty widely in terms of who I talk to.  I've been on podcasts with quite conservative folks (The Remnant but also Advisory Opinions and EconTalk) but also with very left-leaning folks (the Three Moves Ahead folks come to mind, several being professedly anti-capitalist).

There are certainly limits and absolutely podcasts I would not do, but I think that if the goal is to reach people, well you have to go where the people are.  In this case, I think there is a lot of value talking in conservative venues about the past in a way that takes the shine off of a lot of nostalgia about it, particularly the 'RETVRN' brand of ultra-conservatism that wants to go back to what they imagine medieval values were are exceedingly silly.  And doing so also demonstrates, I hope, both the value and interest in doing history.

But that has been my month!  I am hoping to take a bit of a break for myself the next few days (this week is going to be a Fireside addressing some of the comments on the Status Quo Coalition post), and then we're going to dive into the structure of the Roman Republic!

As an extra treat, for the curious, I've attached a PDF of my book proposal, the 12-page document outlining the book's structure, aims, methods and intended audience.  Please, if you find a typo, do not tell me.