The most significant scholarly work I am currently undertaking is a book project. Colonial Christianity Against the Hierarchies of Empire, which uses the research I conducted for my dissertation but makes a new and very distinct argument from the dissertation, is currently under revision after feedback from Ashgate press. I will resubmit to Ashgate in 2016 and feel that I have reasonable expectation that the project will be accepted for publication.
The book proposal and prospectus are available here: ChosenRaceBookProposal. The introduction to the book is here: Chosen_Race_Introduction.
I have worked on this project since 2011. My first post-dissertation steps toward the book came out of my participation in a Summer Institute four-day intensive Academic Publication Workshop. Hosted by the CCCU, the workshop took place at the Adams Center and was run by Dr. Caron Gentry (formerly of the Political Science Department here, now at St. Andrews University). The workshop accepted ten participants from ACU, as well as faculty from other CCCU institutions, and I enjoyed getting to meet faculty from other departments and disciplines who were also seeking to publish. I came in hoping to get at least a draft of a book proposal written based on my dissertation. I did identify the top two publishers I wanted to pursue and drafted cover letters and chapter outlines for both during the workshop. By the end of July I felt I had to lay the book proposal aside to focus on preparing the new courses that I had to teach in the upcoming academic year. (I had two new preps in Fall 2011 and another in Spring 2012).
In the spring of 2013, after my son was born, I contacted the editor of Baylor Press, Dr. Carey Newman. I felt that Baylor would be a good home for my project because they had published several books that were similar to mine in theme and chronological scope. Carey and I spoke on the phone and exchanged emails several times over the course of the spring, and my conversations with him really helped refine my ideas about the goals, uniqueness, and audience of the book. In the end, Carey decided not to take it on, since it was a dissertation-to-book project and would require more time than his editors would be able to give in the next few publishing cycles. The rejection was disappointing, but I was emboldened by the conversation and full of new ideas. Fueled by these, I worked throughout the summer of 2013 on sharpening the book proposal and prospectus, focusing particularly on the relevance and immediacy of the project for readers who are interested in race, power, and global Christianity right now. I planned to submit to Eerdmans Press, a major academic publishing house in religion and religious history, in the fall, and had even drafted an email to one of the editors, when I began hearing some things from people who had worked with that press that concerned me–that they were unresponsive or slow to assist, and that they were uninterested in the work of junior scholars.
Around this same time, my Baylor colleague Joe Stubenrauch (whose letter detailing his observation of my scholarship is available on the first page of the Scholarship section) told me about a new series being developed by Ashgate Press on the history of evangelicalism. Ashgate is an independent academic press that publishes work in a number of fields within the Humanities and Social Sciences. I did further research on the Ashgate series and its editors, discovered that they are keen to receive manuscripts from scholars who are working on their first major projects, and decided that Ashgate would be a better fit for me than Eerdmans. Accordingly, I spent much of the winter of 2013/14 reworking the proposal to meet Ashgate’s specifications, wrote a new section of the introduction, and submitted all of those materials (linked above) to Ashgate in March 2014. After a series of emails, the editors requested that I also send my PhD dissertation. I did so after consulting with a couple of my departmental colleagues, and in May, I received their response and the report of their outside reader, both linked here: AshgateResponse and Readers-report-on-Elliott-Chosen-Race.
Even though it was not an absolute yes, I was very encouraged to read that the editors are keenly interested in a revised project, albeit one that takes the outside reader’s suggestions seriously. Effectively, this is a revise and resubmit response.
So, Chosen Race is currently under revision as I work to respond to the suggestions of the outside reader. A significant amount of work remains to be done in revising the manuscript, but I do feel that the reader’s notes will be very helpful to me. I intend to resubmit to Ashgate in 2016.
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