PhD & Post-Ac
Three Tricks to Finishing that Dissertation
Anyone who has completed a PhD dissertation, or who is currently in the throes of completing one knows what it’s like- It’s this marathon writing…
PhDs, pens, and penchants for the written word
A group blog, 2016–2020Historians who kept writing after the dissertation.
Smart Women Write was started in 2016 by three women with PhDs in history and art history and grew into a weekly blog about how writing gets done: morning pages, day jobs, books, students, archives, and life outside the tenure track. Every post is here, by year and by writer.
from the shelf
Interview · May 13, 2019
Sparkling Water and Chocolate Eclairs: An Interview with Lauren Collins
The New Yorker staff writer on her road from Vogue to Paris, how she drafts, and the book she was writing about Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898.
Read the interviewStart here
All 167 postsSix posts to start with
PhD & Post-Ac
From Dissertation to Book
After my defense—at 11:30AM on the day of the solar eclipse in 2017—, I felt a change in the cosmos.
PhD & Post-Ac
On the Virtues of (Feminist) Mentorship in Academia
While I was sitting out on my friend’s back porch the other day, I knew I had struck gold. The two of us were deep in conversation about my recent…
The Writer's Life
Writing With A Day Job
I think it’s something every working writer struggles with. Most of my friends write, some of them full-time, and others on the side of a full or…
PhD & Post-Ac
From PhD to Here: Towards a Life outside of Academia
This May will mark my second #withaphd anniversary, and with it, the second year since I began to move away from academia and towards some kind of…
Art & Public History
Creation & Curation: The Fort Negley Oral History Archive
How a Vanderbilt working group began filming descendants of the builders and USCT defenders of Nashville’s Fort Negley to create an open-access…
Public history
Fort Negley and the Slave Route
In 2017 one of our writers drafted the nomination that put Nashville’s Fort Negley, a Union fort built largely by enslaved and free Black laborers, forward to UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. In May 2019 the fort received the designation. The posts follow the story from a crowded Parks Board meeting to the oral history archive recorded with descendants of the builders and soldiers.
The masthead
About the writersWho wrote here
The last pages
2020Most recent posts
Life & Self-Care
Now Is the Time to be Rude
A friend of mine from a writer’s group had to go to the post office. Here in Nashville, it often falls on customers to enforce social distancing…
Life & Self-Care
Dispatches from Quarantine 2020
As I wrote on Facebook earlier, today is tentative. Today, I was supposed to start my (much-needed) two-week spring break.
PhD & Post-Ac
Dear Job Searchers: Don’t Forget to Have Fun
I recently had coffee with a friend before going to see the Oscar-nominated animation short films.
Teaching
Mindful Moments
In the past couple of years, I’ve tried to embrace mindfulness more frequently in my life. I tend to be on the go a lot, and have multiple to-do…
Art & Public History
When a White Scholar’s Work is Not Cited: 1619
I don’t need an excuse to talk about the 1619 project . It’s so exciting! Synthetic works like this, which center groups that colonizer-history has…
Teaching
Learning to Love Online Teaching
Last week was the start of my 2020 spring semester and although much of it was very familiar, it will be unique because it’s the first time I will be…
Marginalia
All essaysRereading the archive
- Oct 15, 2026An Hour Before the Email: How the Smart Women Actually Got Writing Donenew essay
- Oct 14, 2026Leaving the Seminar Room: What the Writers Learned About Life After the PhDnew essay
- Oct 13, 2026Who Gets Cited, Who Gets Recorded: Footnotes and Oral Histories in the Archivenew essay