We welcome new submissions to the Emerging Scholars Network Blog. As Associate Director and also blog editor for ESN, I wanted to share some large goals we have for the blog over time and some formats we’re looking for right now. We’ve also made some recent improvements in our submissions process, which we hope will make things easier for everyone. I look forward to reading your writing in 2021! – Hannah Eagleson, ESN Associate Director
Long Term Goal: Build A Library for Following Jesus in Your Early Academic Career
At ESN, we believe the years between pursuing graduate school and reaching tenure are crucial for shaping the life of a scholar. It’s in these formative years that scholars decide who they will be in the university and beyond. That’s why we’re building a library of resources at the ESN blog to help scholars follow Jesus and work for the common good at each stage of their early academic careers (undergraduate, grad school, postdoc, and early career faculty). We welcome your help and input as we craft that library over time.
2021 Goal: Help Scholars Connect Faith and Work in a Complex Year
In 2021, Christians in the university are navigating the challenges of an ongoing pandemic, including radically reimagined classes and research structures. For this year, we’ll be focusing on material that helps Christians on the academic pathway connect their faith and their work deeply in a complex moment. We’ve chosen to focus our writer recruitment on concise and powerful formats. They include devotionals connecting faith and academic life, and prayers for field areas. Below are brief descriptions and links to submit. We’ll review submissions once a quarter (see scheduling info below), but please submit whenever you have something ready.
What We’re Looking For
Scholar’s Compass: Devotionals That Connect Faith & Academic Life (500-700 words)
We invite you to write about how your faith and your academic life connect in this devotional format. Share an insight into your research that illuminated something about God; an insight from your faith that helped you understand your field area; how your academic life helped you grow in a particular virtue; an experience of teaching that helped you grow in faith; or some other way that you see your life as an academic and as a follower of Christ connecting.
Format: 1) A quotation from Scripture or a Christian author 2) A 500-700 word reflection connecting an aspect of faith and academic life 3) A question for reflection 4) A prayer
Examples:
Glory-Seeking Ministry in the Academic Life
Navigating the Rapids Scholar’s Compass Series (3-part)
Submit here for Scholar’s Compass
Prayers for Field Areas (50-500 words)
We’ve found that students and faculty really appreciated prayers for their field area, and that not many are published. We’re helping to fill that gap by crowdsourcing prayers from the talented scholars in our network. Send us prayers for those studying in your field area, whatever it may be. These can be very short or a bit longer–we welcome a variety of lengths.
Format: Flexible
Examples: Browse the archives here
Submit here for Field Area Prayers
Announcements
We also welcome announcements that may interest our readers. These include job postings, calls for papers, conference announcements, info on meetups for Christians at academic conferences, and more. While we can’t promise to publish all of them, we do our best to share helpful news as our publishing schedule allows.
Submit here for Announcements
Other
Feel free to submit other articles of interest to Christian academics, and we’ll review them to see if they fit our publishing lineup.
Submit here for Other Submissions
More Details: Audience & Process
Our audience is Christian scholars along the academic pathway (those exploring graduate school, graduate students, postdocs, and early career faculty). We invite submissions in the formats above, and other material of interest to emerging scholars following Christ and working for the common good, in the university and beyond.
We invite all interested authors to submit work through our online submissions system. We will review material quarterly, decide on what fits our publishing schedule for that quarter, and contact authors at that point. At this time, we are able to make a decision about publication only after a piece has been submitted through our submissions system.
Submissions & Review Schedule
We encourage submissions at any time, and we review submissions and respond to them on a quarterly schedule. Deadlines and planned review periods are listed below.
April Deadline: 4/5/21
We plan to review pieces submitted by April 5 and contact authors by May 5.
July Deadline: 7/5/21
We plan to review pieces submitted by July 5 and contact authors by August 5.
October Deadline: 10/5/21
We plan to review pieces submitted by October 5 and contact authors by November 5.
January Deadline: 1/5/22
We plan to review pieces submitted by January 5 and contact authors by February 5.
Hannah Eagleson is Interim Associate Director of InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Network (ESN). She launched and still edits ESN’s collaboratively written devotional for academics, Scholar’s Compass. Hannah also crafts other community-building events and materials for ESN. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Delaware, and an MA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. she’s working on a novel about a dragon who gave up fending off knights to become a tea importer in eighteenth-century England.
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