British Academy PDF: The Dirty Secrets
Secret No.1 : Academic Contribution
(Inform & Inspire)
• 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?
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.
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.
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).
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…
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.
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).
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).