Creative Research Writing in English

This 8-week course is intended to help you think about, refresh, and hopefully enjoy writing creatively about your research. The intention is not to encourage you to submit a piece of creative writing to a research journal or your dissertation supervisor; it is to reflect on technical and stylistic decisions, and to equip you to write for other audiences; even how to push the limits of scholarly prose.

We’ll be reading short extracts and essays each week and thinking about style, address, mode(s) of argumentation, uses of evidence, and lots of other things. Some of the authors on the list for this year are: Ted Chiang, Kodwo Eshun, Alison Gopnik, Christina Sharpe, and Mackenzie Wark. I’m also open to texts you think will be a great addition to the course.

We collaborate with the European Review of Books: their editors have agreed to read and comment on the end-of-course submissions, provided they’re in good enough shape to send. In the past, they have taken some forward for publication in the “Pearls” section of the magazine.

By the end of the workshop series you will

• have a better understanding of the appropriacy of particular techniques to your own writing;
• have explored how creativity may enhance your writing – and considered the limitations of these;
• have had the opportunity to discuss and experiment with genre and form in a supportive environment;
• have produced a short piece of “creative academic prose,” received instructor and peer feedback, and be ready to submit for publication (if desired).

This course encourages you to identify those “ruts” of prose in your own work and introduces you to an eclectic range of writing that is on the margins of “academic writing” in order to help you broaden your range as a writer.

We read a selection of short English-language texts that are circulated prior to meetings. A syllabus is distributed at the start of the course.

Activities inside and outside class include:

• reading
• structured discussion and textual analysis activities
• drafting, peer-editing, revision, submission

Ben Carver teaches English research writing and communication at the EUI Centre for Academic Literacies and Languages (CALL). His PhD in literary history was awarded in 2012 (University of Exeter) and appeared as a monograph in 2017 (Palgrave). Since then he has published research articles, edited a volume of essays on literature and conspiracy culture (Routledge), and published pieces for a broad readership on television programmes, science fiction, and music. He is interested in supporting early-career academics’ ability to write and publish in a range of formats, for audiences within and beyond the academy.