The Toad wants to become Dr. Toad. Can you help?

February 9, 2009 3:26 AM

Academic Philosophy: Is there any chance a US/UK publishing house will consider my dissertation for publication?

I just finished my dissertation in Philosophy at a German University. It's written in English and is concerned with a current debate in Bioethics.(*) I've passed all examinations and am now required to publish my dissertation before I can call myself "Dr. phil." (German equivalent to Ph.D.). Publishing your dissertation is not optional, but required in the German system. The normal procedure for a German doctoral student would therefore be to find a publishing house. However, I've been told by fellow philosophers that publishing an English language dissertation with a German publisher (like Mentis, LIT…) is less than ideal, because then, nobody outside Germany will ever read it or have access to it.

So here's my question(s):

Do US/UK academic philosophers sometimes/ever publish their dissertations in book form, or is this totally out of the question (or only relevant for "superstars")? In Germany, almost all academic publishing houses have special divisions for publishing dissertations - I understand that this is not the case for UK/US publishers. Do publishing houses accept dissertations anyway?

In your experience, is there any realistic chance that US/UK publishers would consider a (English-language) German dissertation for publication, at all? If the consensus is that the chances of this working out are near to zero, I'm not going to waste any time on it... Doing revisions, even relatively extensive changes, would be acceptable for me, though.

I could, of course, also publish my dissertation online (my University has a system for this). That would be hassle-free and everybody anywhere could read it for free - great!!! But: in Germany (at least in Philosophy), there is a still a strong bias against publishing online. People assume that if your dissertation is "just" published online, this is because it's so terribly bad that no "real" publisher accepted it. Ugh. Publishing in article format is not an option either, since this would not satisfy the publication requirements of my university.

Any ideas? I do not plan on staying in academia, I just want to get this thing published in a way that looks half-decent and reputable in the long term (i.e. on my CV). My thesis advisor and his colleagues couldn't really help me with my questions...

[(*) In case you're curious: I worked on the ethics of creating human-animal interspecifics, i.e. chimeras and hybrids, and it was great fun!]

posted by The Toad to education (10 comments total)

In archaeology, there are always a few old reliables with a relatively low bar of entry--British Archaeological Reports comes to mind (I'm not saying this in a pejorative sense; it's great that there is a respected and open publisher out there). I'm not sure if such publishers exist for philosophy, but they certainly may.

If they don't, do you want a job in Germany? If not, you could always publish online to get the Herr Professor Doktor title and be job-eligible, and then tweak it and publish it at a US/UK house in due time.
posted by The Michael The at 3:52 AM on February 9

What about a publisher like Walter de Gruyter? They publish academic work from all over the place and those books are available abroad. I should think they'd look very good on a CV. I didn't really understand the objection to going through a German publisher, though, so this might not be what you're looking for.
posted by mail at 4:28 AM on February 9

would publishing via ProQuest UMI Dissertation Publishing be acceptable to your university?
posted by davemack at 5:28 AM on February 9

Hey, a question just made for me. As a philosopher who writes in English...

What I woudl say is that there's only the tiniest chance of getting your dissertation published by one of the major publishing houses in philosophy (Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Blackwell, and a few others). I've published a lot of stuff over the last few years and I'd still have only the slimmest of chances of getting them to even give my manuscript full consideration. The big houses are overwhelmed with submissions and, unfortunately, a good bit of the sorting seems to be who you know.

A smaller publisher like Walter de Gruyter might work. Your best bet - and this, too, is a bit of a longshot - is to find a smaller publisher doing niche work in your field. A friend of mine got his dissertation (in slightly revised form) published by SUNY because they specialize in Asian philosophy and his dissertation was the first major work on some new material from Mencius.

In general, I would say, if you plan to come back to the US for work, not having your dissertation in print is not going to be an issue. Very, very few philosophers publish them. It's much more common to spin off two or three chapters into journal articles. Unless you have completely reinvented the entire field, you might be better off doing the quick and dirty route via the German publishers and reworking a couple chapters to submit to Ethics and similar journals.
posted by el_lupino at 6:03 AM on February 9 [1 favorite]

In the UK, I wouldn't expect you to be able to publish your PhD with an academic press straight off. There is no requirement here to 'publish' your thesis; generally all you need to do is give two suitably bound and formatted copies to your university.

That being said, people staying in academia will usually (in the humanities) try and use their first post-doc position to turn the thesis into a book, or thesis chapters into peer-reviewed articles, or (ideally!) both.
posted by Jakob at 6:23 AM on February 9

I can't speak for philosophy, but in the social sciences a dissertation might be at best the first draft of a book, as far as a respectable university press in concerned. A good dissertation can get you a book contract, but given the state most dissertations are in when completed one is generally looking at a multi-year revision process before book publication.
posted by shadow vector at 6:36 AM on February 9

In my field (biology) books and book chapters are not given as much credence as peer-reviewed papers. Peer-review is where it's at. If the same is the case in your field, then I would turn those thesis chapters into journal articles and just publish the thesis online. Judging by some of the answers above it actually sounds like this might be significantly less work than turning the thing into a book.

If you're not interested in staying in academia you needn't aim particularly high in terms of which journals you submit the papers to, and you'll have the chance of having a publication list on your CV rather than a single book. And of course you can still go ahead and turn the thesis into a book at a later date.
posted by jonesor at 7:59 AM on February 9

A friend of mine got a PhD in philosophy at a U.S. school with a thesis on Hume, and for a while was in discussions about publishing it in Scotland with some modifications, where Hume books apparently actually sell enough to make it worth doing commercially. Which is to say: an interesting thesis on the bioethics of chimeras might actually attract a certain publisher in the U.S. or the U.K. if it's presented to them as a work that can sell a few thousand copies, or nicely round out their catalogue for prestige reasons.

Have you looked for publishers outside the academic world in the English language world?
posted by fatbird at 8:37 AM on February 9

Do US/UK academic philosophers sometimes/ever publish their dissertations in book form, or is this totally out of the question (or only relevant for "superstars")...Do publishing houses accept dissertations anyway?

The brief answer is yes, they most definitely do accept dissertations for publication, but rarely as-is. Depending on how well the dissertation is written and organized, you will likely be required to do substantial revisions for it to be published. You may also be asked to shift the focus somewhat, or add new material if it is on a topic of contemporary salience (for example, the ethics of creating human-animal interspecifics). So if you are looking to just dump the dissertation on a publisher and see it published immediately, you're almost certainly out of luck. But if you are willing to put some more time into revising it, then your chance should be better.

In your experience, is there any realistic chance that US/UK publishers would consider a (English-language) German dissertation for publication, at all?

This really depends on how specific your topic is, what your audience is, and how it is written. If it is on a topic that would only be of interest to a small German academic audience, then it is unlikely that they would consider it. But if it has relevance to a larger, English-speaking audience (or you are willing to revise it to make it so), then they would certainly consider it.

A couple more pieces of advice:

(1) If academic philosophy is too difficult to publish in, try the imprints in bioethics, medical ethics, science and technology studies, or medical humanities (here's one example of a list from Hopkins). They may be more likely to publish on your topic.

(2) The person that you are looking for is the acquisitions editor at a press - they are the ones who make the first determination on whether they would be willing to publish something. Type up a brief summary of your dissertation and send it out to them; they would be able to give you real advice on the matter.

(3) If you have the time and cash, go to a conference in a relevant field (in this case bioethics - see, for example, the annual ASBH meeting) and visit the affiliated book show. This is where the acquisitions editors hang out and you can talk to a bunch of them at the same time.
posted by googly at 8:39 AM on February 9

IME, most dissertations are printed and available in the library of the school you attend, and now available on JSTOR in PDF form, and you either, as above, spin off a few articles, and / or rewrite it to become your first book over the first couple years of your career. It is unusual to publish it as-is immediately, and practically unheard of to do so before you actually get your degree.
posted by mdn at 9:03 AM on February 9