Write for us?
We aim with this blog to promote good scholarly conversations, by offering early career, independent or established academics the opportunity to write posts in response to some of our events. If this describes you, and you have attended, or are planning to attend any of our events, we’d be delighted to hear from you. We are particularly interested when such writing crosses international borders and disciplinary boundaries. This is a particularly good opportunity for MA students and PhD candidates, but also for any academic looking to enhance their public engagement with a little collegiate conversation.
If you’d like to write a post, here are some guidelines. These are not strict requirements. They are designed to help us maintain consistency, and to help you organise your writing more easily.
- We are extremely grateful for any post you would like to contribute. However, whether and when we can publish your post will depend on how well it fits our existing content and schedule.
- To help that process, you are advised to email us first (cys@soas.ac.uk) if possible, with:
- The event or talk that you would like to write about.
- A link to or example of your existing writing.
- When written, your post should be engaging to an informed reader, but be of a sure academic standard – like an editorial, opinion piece or book review for a journal.
- A post should not consist of a summary of the event or talk. It will need to highlight and analyse a few of the ideas or concepts that most caught your attention. A post will typically include 2 or 3 such references.
- A review of a single event alone can be at the heart of the post, but it is good to also include links to other theories and scholars, such as:
- a reference to a previous talk/event if you’ve seen one that you also liked and thought there were interesting parallels to make.
- a reference to something elsewhere such as an existing piece of research that you are aware of.
- a reference to an upcoming event or forthcoming publication that you can speculate about.
- a link to your own ideas in some form, such as a blog post or article elsewhere.
- In this way we can show how scholarship is a conversation that we all contribute to, and showcase multiple angles and relationships between different research.
- A post will typically include 2 or 3 such references.
- There is no strict word limit, but a post should be around 500-750 words.
- We would like you if possible to share your draft post with the speaker of the event you are reviewing, so that they can check for any minor inaccuracies or spellings. We will help you do that.
- We will then copy-edit your post if we decide to publish it, but please make sure your post has been fully checked for typographic errors and similar.
- If your post includes Sanskrit terms that have not been widely lexicalised into English, diacritics should be used.
- A post can include a short bibliography of less than 10 entries, properly referenced in MRHA (Author-Date) format or similar.
- You should also send a very short professional biography of around 50 words.
- If you want, the post can also include:
- a headshot of you
- a link to your professional online presence (webpage, Instagram page or similar)
- Email your post to cys@soas.ac.uk to be considered.