[This week AmericanStudier celebrates its 13th anniversary! For this year’s anniversary series, I wanted to highlight a handful of key moments and pieces in my development as an online public scholar, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some key influences on that evolving career!]
In my
first couple years of scholarly blogging, I had the chance to
guest post on others’
blogs on occasion, generally folks like Rob
Velella and William
Kerrigan whose work I was fortunate enough to share in Guest Posts here as
well. I treasured each of those opportunities, but they didn’t feel distinctly
different from what I was already doing here. The first online writing
opportunity that did feel more distinct came from The Historical Society, a collective
public scholarly website co-edited by Heather Cox Richardson. THS reached out
to me in mid-2013 both to write a new
post on public scholarship and then to re-share a weeklong
series of mine on Newport, Rhode Island. Both of those opportunities—to write
something new for a public scholarly online community, and to see my public
scholarly blogging appearing in such as space—significantly changed my sense of
myself in these spaces and roles, and really helped me realize that I was becoming
an online public scholar as well as helping to grow collective spaces for that
work. I had the chance to do the same for a few other sites around the same
time, including Richardson’s next and even bigger venture, We’re History.
But The Historical Society was really the first, and I can’t overstate how
influential it was in helping me redefine myself and my work in these evolving
ways.
Next
anniversary reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Online writing or work of yours I can highlight and share?
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