At the end of the spring semester, the Moody School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, in conjunction with the SMU English department, hosted the inaugural Academic Writing for the Public Workshop. From May 20th to May 23rd, PhD students in the humanities learned how to frame their scholarly pursuits for the public and received focused and specific writing feedback.
The workshop was led by Jonathan Malesic, an SMU writing professor whose essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Hedgehog Review, The Point, Psyche, and elsewhere. His most recent book, The End of Burnout, was named the Best Book of 2022 by Amazon and The Next Big Idea Club. Workshop participants were also lucky to work with and learn from Rhonda Garelick, SMU’s D.E. Hughes Jr Distinguished Chair for English and writer for The New York Times style section, and Willard Spiegelman, the Hughes Professor of English, emeritus, and prolific literary critic and contributor to The Wall Street Journal.