Authorship, Scholarship, Editorship

As academics, we spend much of our time asserting our positions as authors to define and debate scholarship. By our second or third decade on the job, most of us like to think we know good research and writing when we see it. Institutions and organizations rely on our expert judgment to educate students, hire and retain faculty, evaluate publication projects, and assess grant applications. Whereas graduate training prepared us to eventually assume these expansive and interlinked responsibilities, it did not directly cultivate our editorial skills. I realize now, as I step into the JSAH editor role, the importance of learning to assemble, adapt, and refine other scholars’ work, after judging its merit. Intellectually, editorship draws on an inclination to see the field holistically, inclusively, and imaginatively. In practice, editorship today demands active articulation of the value of expanding access, equity, and inclusion in the work that we do. I...