This week’s guest post comes from Liz Gloyn, who has just completed her PhD in classics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She blogs on her research, teaching and classical receptions in popular culture. You can follow her on Twitter here. In this post, Liz talks about turning a section of your Ph.D. into a talk.

At some stage in your academic career, you are likely to need to turn a thesis chapter into a talk. You may be speaking at an academic conference in order to put your research into a wider public arena, or you may have been asked to prepare a presentation on your dissertation for a job interview. Putting aside the general issues of constructing an oral presentation, like keeping to the time limit, changing a chapter into a talk poses a number of special challenges. PhD2Published normally talks about how to take things the other way, how to get research into a publishable form from a conference paper, but there are a number of reasons you might decide to road-test an idea from your thesis in a public forum before preparing it for publication. You might want to check out how a particular argument fares in front of a jury of your peers before committing yourself to standing behind it in print. You might want to get some general feedback about your work, especially if you’re revising your thesis for publication and want some ideas about how you might broaden its appeal. Whatever you reason for talking about your thesis research, here are some things to bear in mind as you prepare your talk. Read more

As part of our week devoted to social networking here we present the second in the two part guest post by our intern Lucy Wickens on how to use Facebook for networking and research, you can see her previous post here.

Welcome back!

So hopefully by now you have successfully set up an account and are eager to become avid Face- bookers! Read more

This is the second of our social media week posts. Here Eloise Zoppos examines how postgraduate students can manage their professional social media use. Eloise Zoppos is now embracing the virtual for the professional and you can find out more about her on her website http://eloisezoppos.com or follow her on Twitter @eloise_z.

Lately it seems like everything virtual is now normal: using Facebook to contact friends, reading the news online, calling people through Skype, online banking. Over the last few years, this rise in online activities has slowly begun to seep into the academic world with online conferences, virtual internships and online resumes (hosted on both LinkedIn and personal websites) just to name a few. This got me thinking about whether as a postgraduate student interested in getting published I should be investing more time into using social media for professional purposes. Read more

little known fact is that the working title for this website was Platforming for Academic Publishing. I was very familiar with the idea that an author needs to be ‘visible’, preferably before they pitch, and I wanted to look at this specifically in relation to academia. I ditched the title because this isn’t all I wanted to do with this site and because it seemed a bit jargony in the end – and besides PhD2Published is way cuter!

I also didn’t start the site with looking at platform building, but instead I set about installing lots of ways to flood it with content on how to make your book pitch, as this seemed the best way to establish it. But I do want to visit this idea of the platform now and, as luck would have it, a good post just came out on Writer’s Relief to remind me. Although this article, ‘Author Platforms: What They Are, Why Agents And Editors Look For Them, And Whether You Need One To Get Your Book Published’ doesn’t tackle the idea of being an academic and having a demonstrable following for your work, it does look at the idea of the platform for the non-fiction author. Read more