A journal as teaching tool
As part of the last year of their BA program, our Art History students take the course The academic art of publishing. Our BA-program has two tracks, the Dutch-spoken track Kunstgeschiedenis and the English-spoken Arts, Media and Society and in our course we therefore work with two groups, each taught by a separate lecturer and creating their own edition of the journal.
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Before the course starts, a call for papers is sent out to all students in the entire BA-program (all years) and the MA-program. Students are encouraged to submit essays they have written for earlier courses as well as papers they are working on at the time. The two lecturers of the course make a selection of essays which seem suitable for rewriting as academic papers - about ten papers per editions. By the time the course starts, the final authors have been selected and the students in the course begin work on the revision of the submitted papers.
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Students critically evaluate, edit, and format the submitted texts. In addition, all students in the course write a book review and the best of these are selected for publication alongside the selected papers.
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In groups, the students act as peer reviewers of the essays and send feedback to the authors, who revise their texts and resubmit. After two peer review rounds, including a round of feedback on all papers by the two lecturers, the texts are ready for formatting, copy-editing and publication.
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The students in the course take on all tasks needed to come to the final publications: they copy-edit, get reproduction permissions for images, write introductory texts and author bios, design the cover art and graphics, create the layout of the texts and promote sales of the journals.
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Throughout the course, the students learn about aspects of the publication process that will serve them both within and outside the academic world. They befome familiar with the process and tools of academic publishing, through hands-on work as well as lectures by their teachers and guest lectures by publishing professionals. The course therefore strikes a balance between academic and practical knowledge: it provides a deeper understanding of the academic journal, while at the same time allowing the students to acquire and extend skills commonly found in internships in our field.
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But the journal is not merely a teaching tool. It is a serious, semi-academic journal (peer reviewed by BA3 students) and allows alumni, parents, future students and others to learn about the research our students carry out in their various courses. In general, when a student writes a paper for a course, only the lecturer and perhaps a proofreading fellow student will get to see the work. This is a shame and allowing all students in the program to submit their best work for open access publication creates a great opportunity to share our research.
Editorial board
The editorial board consists of the 60 to 70 students in the course and the two lecturers coordinating the groups. Names of the students (as well as the author bios) can be found in the colophons of the published editions.
Elizabeth den Hartog
Editor Kunstgeschiedenis edition (Dutch)
Elizabeth den Hartog holds a post as associate professor at Leiden University (since 1986), teaching art and architecture until 1600. Her main research interest is in medieval art and architecture, a subject on which she has published widely, in the Netherlands and abroad. As guest-keeper of the Maastricht Bonnefanten Museum she wrote a monograph on the Romanesque sculpture of the churches in Maastricht, which was the basis for the exhibition "The Road to Paradise" in 2003-2004. For the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (Amersfoort) she studied the medieval sculpture in the church of Doorn (many authors), the architectural sculpture of the church of St Eusebius in Arnhem (with Ronald Glaudemans), on the cathedral of Utrecht and on the now-lost church of Kerkdriel (2011-2016).
Laura Bertens
Editor Arts Media and Society edition (English)
Laura Bertens is a university lecturer of Art History at Leiden University with interests in the fields of memory studies, contemporary art and cultural studies. She analyses the construction and functioning of cultural memory in art, as well as everyday culture. She has published book chapters and articles on topics ranging from cultural memory in music videos, the Berlin Wall Memorial, Holocaust remembrance in art, to the construction of memory through museum audio guides and the representation of extinction in the natural history museum. She is currently co-coordinator (with Johannes Müller) of the research theme Ecologies, Environment, Extinctions.