Past Events

From Thesis to Book

ECRN Events – Gregory Salter, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Zoë Thomas

  • 29 November 2021
  • 6:00 – 7:30 pm

This is an event for  ECRN members only. Find more about the network here.

How do you start to think about turning your PhD thesis into a published book? How do you figure out which publishers to contact, and when and how should you reach out to them? What do you need to include in a book proposal? Do the corrections that you receive from your examiners have an impact on whether or not your book will come to fruition? Does your thesis have to become a book at all? These are some of the questions that ECRs encounter when approaching the daunting task of publishing a book based on doctoral research. We hope to address these questions, and many more, with this panel discussion.

During this evening event, three speakers who have all successfully published their PhD research as monographs will share the ups and downs of their experiences. Join us to hear their advice on how to succeed in this process, what to avoid, and what they would have done differently if they could do it all again.

Our speakers will each give a 15-minute talk, followed by a Q&A session and a general discussion on the current book publishing landscape for ECRs.

About the speakers

  • Greg%202

    Greg Salter is a lecturer in art history at the University of Birmingham. His first book Art And Masculinity In Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home was published in 2019. He is currently researching queer transnational art histories from Britain since the 1960s.

  • Cora Gilroy-Ware headshot sitting on a bench

    Cora Gilroy-Ware’s research explores continuities between historic and contemporary, ancient and modern. Her doctoral project on the surprisingly under-researched classical nude in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British art led to her first book, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain, and a broader interest in neglected chapters in the history of visual classicism. As a scholar of BIPOC heritage, she seeks to reconcile decolonial approaches with traditional art historical areas of concern. With support from the Henry Moore Foundation, she is currently at work on a second book project on adaptations of Greco-Roman art, particularly marble sculpture, among artists of African and indigenous American descent including Mary Edmonia Lewis, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Carrie Mae Weems and Kara Walker. She has curated exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Huntington, and written for the London Review of Books, Apollo, The White Review and other journals.

  • Portrait face on of Dr Zoe Thomas

    Zoë Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham. She graduated from her PhD in 2016, and that year she was the very grateful recipient of a Paul Mellon Centre Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her first monograph, Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement, was published in 2020 (Manchester University Press). She has also co-edited Suffrage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics, and Enterprise with Miranda Garrett (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain (IHR/RHS/University of London, 2021) with Heidi Egginton.