Society of Fellows Writing Retreats

The Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholars organized two successful writing retreats last year. It has been so rewarding to celebrate their successes as articles they worked on during the retreats are now coming to fruition.

After the fall retreat at Moosilauke, Kasia Warburton wrote, "I worked on turning a chapter of my thesis into a paper draft, which I'd been procrastinating on for quite some time. The retreat gave me the focused time to reshape the structure of the paper and isolate the work that still needed doing into a finite to-do list. By the end of the retreat, I had something in fit shape to send round to colleagues for feedback and will hopefully submit the finished paper soon." Less than a year later, the article has been published! You can read "A shallow approximation for ice streams sliding over strong beds" in Journal of Glaciology.

About the fall retreat, Miriam Rich remembered: "This retreat provided me the focused time and space to finally tackle and complete edits on an article that had received a "revise and resubmit." Directly after the retreat, I submitted the revised manuscript (to a top journal in my field) and it was accepted for publication. I also had the opportunity to deepen my professional relationship with other postdoctoral fellows, and to participate in collaborative discussion related to professional goal setting." Miriam's article, "Monstrosity in Medical Science: Race-Making and Teratology in the Nineteenth-Century United States" is now hot off the press in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society.

Tory Jeffay wrote this about the fall retreat: "I spent the whole weekend reorganizing an article draft I was stuck on. The time and absence of internet connection allowed me to focus on the thorniness of reshuffling, and I was able to submit the article a week or so later to the flagship journal of my field. I just got my reader reports back, and it's a very positive R&R." Update! Tory's article, "Fatty Arbuckle's Fingerprints: Race, Photographic Evidence, and the Smudge," will appear in 18 months in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Yiren Zheng got busy at the winter retreat: "I finished drafting an upcoming talk at Harvard and an upcoming conference presentation for the 2023 American Comparative Association Annual conference in Chicago. It's my best writing retreat experience so far—got so much writing done with sunshine, the view of snowy mountains, and a fire nearby and got to know SoF colleagues more. Couldn't dream of a better way of being inspired than this!" Yiren got an R&R for an article she worked on at the fall retreat, "Noisy Encounters: Reflections on the Friction between Words and Nonverbal Sounds in Chinese Poetics," and this summer resubmitted it for hopeful publication.

These incredible fellows will be joined by folks in our incoming cohort to replicate these successes at more writing retreats this year. We are so proud of you!