Written by guest blogger, Cheryl Thompson.
I have a PhD from McGill University in Communication Studies. My interdisciplinary research includes Media Studies and Visual Studies, Consumer Culture, Black Canadian History, and Racial and Gender Stereotyping. In 2015, after the initial submission of dissertation on Canada’s black beauty culture history, I stumbled upon the Canadian Journal of History’s (CJH) Graduate Essay Prize. At first, I worried that I did not fit the criteria as a true historian. This thought, however, was soon replaced by belief in my topic. I was truly passionate about my article and the fact that it explored an area in Canadian historical studies and media history that has been overlooked. If I focused on that, I thought, I could win the prize.
Even before writing the paper, I knew that I had a treasure trove of information that didn’t quite fit within my dissertation. Before writing, however, I went to the CJH’s website and read a few articles in order to get a sense of the publication’s tone. I previously had an article accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Feminist Media Studies so I had an idea of the peer review process but unlike the latter, which was a contemporary piece, this would be an historical article the likes of which I had never written before.
I decided to focus my article on the Dawn of Tomorrow, a London, Ontario-based African Canadian newspaper, rather than talk broadly about black newspapers in Canada. By focusing on The Dawn, I was able to distance the article from my dissertation’s focus on the role African Canadian newspapers played in the dissemination of beauty culture. By focusing more specifically on The Dawn, the longest in-circulation African Canadian newspaper on record, I gave my article a clear focus. Second, I didn’t realize it at the time but in retrospect I had purposely not used much of my archival research on The Dawn in my dissertation thinking that a standalone article would make a strong contribution.
If you’re thinking of submitting to the Graduate Essay Prize you need to be creative and think about what you can say about a topic in a standalone piece that you have not already said in a larger piece, i.e. your dissertation. You also need to think about why you are writing your article. Is the topic underexplored? Have you uncovered something new about an existing topic? Do you have time to write the article? After I submitted my dissertation I had a lot of free time on my hands. Instead of going on a vacation or mulling over my plight (i.e. as an unemployed PhD with no teaching appointment or post-doc) I decided to focus on what I could control – my writing. Over the course of several weeks I wrote my article and I can truly say that winning the CJH Graduate Essay Prize has affirmed that my research matters. And that has made all the difference in how I approach not only publishing but also the job market.
Cheryl Thompson’s article, “Cultivating Narratives of Race, Faith, and Community: The Dawn of Tomorrow, 1923–1971” appeared in Volume 50 Issue 1 (2015) of the Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadienne d’histoire. Read it today by clicking here: http://bit.ly/CJH501_Thompson
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