Eleanor Johnson Hurst Talk - "Writing Beyond the Discipline; Writing Beyond the University: How to take your Academic Training to the Public"
Eleanor Johnson is Professor of English at Columbia University. She has published three scholarly monographs on medieval literature, theology, and environmental history, all with University of Chicago: Practicing Literary Theory (2013), Staging Contemplation (2018), and the award-winning Waste and the Wasters (2023). Her newest work pivots to think about the history of women's rights and horror: her 2025 book Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (Simon and Schuster) analyzes the relationship between horror and women's liberation in the 1970s, and her forthcoming 2026 book Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton) analyzes the long history of the demonization of women in Western culture. Her current books in progress center on Dante's Inferno and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Dr. Johnson will talk through her own career trajectory, which has shifted from focusing primarily on writing scholarly monographs for other medievalists to primarily writing for the general public. She will talk about how to identify research projects that might have "crossover appeal," how to begin the process of building out a "public-facing portfolio," how to create content for online publishing fora, how and why it's useful to get an agent, and how to think about pitching material to editors and publishers.