Publishing Scholarly Work in Popular Media

Drawing on my experience as a correspondent for The Atlantic, I’ll explain how digital platforms are blurring the line between scholarly work and popular outreach, bringing the craft of history before unprecedentedly broad audiences. Historians have long published scholarship in journals and books, carefully detailing their sources and methods, and then summarized that work for broader audiences in essays, op-eds, and lectures left largely devoid of that supporting apparatus. Digital publication now allows us to distribute our scholarship directly to broader audiences, and to make it easier than ever to scrutinize our sources and methods. I'll explain how the very technologies that are shrinking the distance between historians and our audiences are also forcing us to renegotiate those relationships, and how they are likely to reshape both the subjects we study and the forms our findings take.