British Academy PDF: The Dirty Secrets

1. British Academy PDF: The Dirty Secrets

2. PDF has got to make an original contribution to knowledge. • Think about time-honoured orthodoxies in the literature. • How is your PDF going to revise this orthodoxy? Secret No.1 : Academic Contribution (Inform & Inspire)

3. Audiences and Salesmanship • Consider audiences (concentric circles) • There is the obvious appeal to the 5 scholars who work on the same subject as you. That’s the easy bit. • But how are you going to make sure your PDF appeals to more than just 5 scholars? • How you appeal to 100 people, 1000 people, 5000 people, etc is different to how you appeal to 5 people. • Big themes, Big Ideas, Big Debates.

4. From PhD to PDF to World Domination • Demonstrate progression from PhD. • Funding bodies like to see intellectual development. • How does this PDF build on your PhD? • How have your intellectual horizons broadened. • Where is this PDF going to take you? • Hopefully, it’s going to make you a research leader in your field. • That’s what the Academy will want to hear.

5. Academic Outputs: • University presses & top publishers (OUP, CUP, Palgrave, MUP, EUP, Routledge, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton etc). • Tip – the Academy has its own monograph scheme with Oxford University Press, specifically for PDFs.) • Be specific: alert the Academy to particular series; shows you have thought this through. • 3* & 4* journal articles; • Special issue of a journal; • Workshops (one held at the Academy); • International Conference; • Consider inter-disciplinarity (have one potential article that transcends your discipline).

6. Secret No. 2: The Public (inform and enlighten) • Academy increasingly likes projects with broader appeal. • Not surprising: Department of Business, Innovation and Skills part funds the scheme. • Academy has a Press and Public Relations Officer. • Public and media appeal is really, really, really important to them. • Think, therefore, about public appeal. Involvement with newspapers, museums, arts centres, theatres, etc. • IMPACT is important. With that in mind…

7. Secret No. 3: The Policy World inform and influence) • Academy has a Policy Centre. • Academy organises Public Policy forums. • Academy produces Policy Reports. • Ergo, think about how your PDF might have policy-relevance. How might you distil ‘lessons learned’ for practitioners in government. • If your PDF deals with big themes (power, money, politics, science, democracy, foreign policy – you name it), there will be policy relevance.

8. Secret No. 4 : Internationalism (inform and globalise) • Academy wants PDFS that: • Create dialogue and partnerships with institutions overseas. • This doesn’t mean having a cup of tea with 1 like-minded scholar in Cambridge, Massachusetts. • It means: creating links with will raise the global profile of a) YOU; b) YOUR DEPARTMENT; c) YOUR UNIVERSITY; and d) THE ACADEMY. • Conferences, workshops, research centres, think tanks. • Snob value: relationships with the University of Strawberry Fields is not going to appeal to the National Academy for Humanities and Social Sciences. • Recognise that the Academy already has links overseas; it’s looking for PDFs that engage with these institutions (Ankara, Athens, Nairobi, Tehran, Rome, Amman, Jerusalem, 23 field centres across Asia).

9. Secret No. 5 : Know Your Host Institution • The Academy needs to know that you are in safe hands; the appeal of Warwick University might be self-evident to you, but not necessarily to the Academy. • What can Warwick do for you? What can Department X at Warwick do for you? What can supervisor X do for you? What professional training does the University offer? What resources does the University possess (MRC, great international links, research support, etc).