Preparing Your Book Proposal

Wednesday, August 5, 2020
7:00pm Eastern Time

In the humanities and social sciences, publishing your first book remains a vital hurdle with relatively high stakes. In this AAS Digital Dialogue, we will discuss a key step in that process—how to craft a book proposal for an academic press. Without focusing on a single discipline or target press, the panelists will share general recommendations, briefly reflect on their own experiences, and take questions from the audience. The panel includes Allison Alexy, a cultural anthropologist focused on Japan; Stephanie Chun, an acquisitions editor at the University of Hawai’i Press; and Sungyun Lim, a historian of Korea. The webinar is open to all AAS Members and will specifically focus on process and proposal for an author’s first book.

Session Transcript

Additional Resources

Works and websites mentioned during the Digital Dialogue session:

Allison Alexy and Emma Cook, ed. Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019).

Allison Alexy, Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2020). 

Asia Pop!

Beth Luey, Revising Your Dissertation (University of California Press, 2007).

Knowledge Unlatched

Sungyun Lim, Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in Colonial Korea (University of California Press, 2019).

Tome

William Germano, From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

William Germano, Getting It Published (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Session Panelists

Allison Alexy is an assistant professor in the Departments of Asian Languages and Cultures, and Women’s Studies, at the University of Michigan. A cultural anthropologist focusing on intimacy and family conflicts in contemporary Japan, she has recently published Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan (Chicago, 2020). She has co-edited Home and Family in Japan: Continuity and Transformation (Routledge 2011) and Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict (Hawai’i 2019). Working with Stephanie Chun at the University of Hawai’i Press, she is the editor for Asia Pop!, an interdisciplinary series focused on popular culture within and beyond Asia.

Stephanie Chun is an acquisitions editor at the University of Hawaii Press. Her areas include anthropology, art history, language, popular culture, and religion. She is the sponsoring editor for several series: Asia Pop!, Contemporary Buddhism, Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism, New Daoist Studies, and Spatial Habitus, among others. 

Sungyun Lim is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her first book, Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in Colonial Korea (University of California Press, 2019), examines the emergence of the small patriarchal family as the legal unit of the family in Korea under the Japanese colonial rule through close examination of records of women’s civil suits over rights of inheritance, adoption, and divorce. Her current project deals with the history of burial sites and lineage property disputes from the end of the Joseon dynasty through the Japanese colonial period.