Writing and Publishing the Academic Article
I sometimes still do one-day workshops in the United States and one-week workshops outside the United States. See the links on the left.

For most graduate students and faculty members, nothing will be more important to success in obtaining jobs, promotions, or a sense of well-being than producing prose for publication. Likewise, nothing is more inclined to induce a wave of anxiety and belatedness in scholars than the thought of producing prose for publication.
      Unfortunately, graduate education and the publishing world itself offer little effective instruction, feedback, or encouragement on how to get academic writing published. When it comes to academic writing today, it's rather like Freud's analysis of sex in nineteenth-century Vienna--everybody does it, but nobody talks about it. Of course, some of my students insist that nobody does it and nobody talks about it or everybody does it badly and nobody talks about it, but whatever the reality it tends toward repression.
     This causes a largely natural act like writing to become dysfunctional--for instance, the procrastination-binge cycle of most academic writers or the endless waiting for a sufficiently large block of uninterrupted time or the belief that writing is a solitary activity. The great secret of academia is that writing dysfunction is the norm rather than the exception.

     According to a nationwide UCLA Higher Education Research Institute survey, 39 percent of all U.S. faculty members have published nothing in the past two years and 29 percent spend no time each week on research or scholarly writing (see the Chronicle of Higher Education story on the earlier 1998-1999 survey.)
     The repressive environment of academic writing led me to design my workshops. Combining my experiences as an academic editor, as a scholarly writer about Africa, and as a graduate student at UCLA, I created courses that address the tremendous pressure on graduate students and faculty members to publish and the dearth of sound advice and practical encouragement they get to do so.
     My ten-week and one-week courses are product-oriented. Everything is organized around getting participants to the point where they have an article in an envelope addressed to an editor at a journal of their choice. In the process, we have fun together, taking some of the terror out of the writing process and putting some of the pleasure back.
     These courses have been a great success. The second time I offered my writing workshop, 200 students called about enrolling. Almost all of those participants who stay with the course actually submit their academic articles for publication and most of them get published, quite a few of them in leading journals. Evaluations place the course among the most valuable of participants' careers.
     Many of my students have gotten their work published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including PMLA; Semiotica; Political Geography; Behavioral Sciences; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Journal of Asian Studies; Psychiatric Services; Review of Black Political Economy; Nineteenth Century Contexts; Medieval and Renaissance Drama; Latin American Perspectives; Journal of American History; Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences; Marketing Education Review; Grey Room; World Politics; Journal of Southern African Studies; and Canadian Journal of African Studies.
     For more information about my writing workshops, including course outlines, see the links on the left. The year-long workshops are not listed there, for instance, the Comparative Literarature Workshop.