This is writing at the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives.

I'm delighted to get to introduce Anna Peterson, who is a professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago and her research focuses on religion and social change, especially in Latin America, environmental and social ethics, and animal studies. Her current research analyzes the role of religion in movements for social change.

She's also involved in several collaborative research projects exploring the ethical challenges presented by climate change. Welcome, Anna. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. And I just want to mention a couple of your recent books. works righteousness, Material Practice and Ethical Theory from 2020. Cats and conservationists. The debate over who owns the outdoors, which you coauthored.

And coming up soon is with God on Our Side. Religion is social movements and social change. So I was thinking of Anna as a guest for today, because I know Anna has done a lot of collaborative work. And I wanted to ask you about when you started to coauthor whether articles and books and why. What made you go down this path?

So I think my earliest collaborations were with social scientists because as a someone working on Latin America, which is, you know, Latin marine space is very interdisciplinary. Lots of the people that I was working with who were interested in religion and social change, religion and politics in Latin America were anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and in those fields, collaborations are much more common than in the humanities, I think.

So I was working with people in conversation with people for whom collaborating is the norm. And so I did some collaborative articles. The first thing I did was a conference paper with a colleague was a political scientist. I think that was the very first kind of collaboration I officially did. And then after getting to UF, I, had long term collaborations with colleagues in Latin American studies there, initially including a large research project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

I also then started working with natural scientists as I began to do more sort of environmental ethics, sustainability related projects. And so I was a co-pi on a NSF grant on the ethics of sustainability. People from political science, forestry, building construction, wildlife ecology. It was very cool. And then, I've also done collaborations with people from the vet school in wildlife ecology.

The cat book was with a wildlife ecologist. So I think for me the doorway was just being in conversations with people, with people for whom collaboration is the norm, which just isn't true in the humanities. And since then, I have done collaborative projects with other scholars in the human, in religion and other humanities fields. So it sounds kind of practical in a way that you needed these areas of expertise that are outside your own.


Absolutely right. You know, and so, for example, for this, the pew funded project, we we produced a book and there was lots of surveys. I'm not a quantitative social scientist. I can't do surveys by myself, but I certainly I can get lots out of them. Yeah. So that and then of course, working with, you know, like wildlife ecologists and veterinarians, they have knowledge base and skill sets and methods that I don't have access to and hopefully vice versa, although I don't know.

Did you also discover in the process this made your work more fun? Oh, completely. It's so much more fun. And that's, you know, the question of why? Well, because it's fun. I mean, it's just that sort of deep conversation, you know, and sometimes collaborations start with, with a conversation. You and I might have a conversation about, oh, we're both kind of interested in this.


Oh, you know, maybe we should do conference paper. And I just find it's one of the reasons I still love my job is because of collaborations. And the results are better because, you know, more brains are better than one. And when I write something by myself now, it feels, you know, sort of like there must be something I'm missing.

And there is certainly. So I really just like the give and take in the way you get to know someone when you're when you're working, whether it's co editing or coauthoring or, or collaborative research. So yeah. So right now I'm collaborating with I've got three collaborative projects right now. One is the Detroiter Handbook of Religion Social Change, which I'm co editing with three former graduate students.

And the another is a book on animals and the left which is an edited volume that I'm doing with a Canadian scholar and the Dutch scholar. And then I've also got a collaboration with an undergraduate right now, some research money from the Bob Graham Center, for public facing research. So these were all things that have different, you know, really different collaborators, different outcomes.

But they're all they're all much stronger for the variety of perspectives. It seems like it keeps you open to people in a different way. If you've learned, as you have, that any relationship might lead to you thinking, oh, I like the way he thinks about this, or his questions would really add something. So I just imagine that that makes being an academic sort of less solitary in a way.

If you realize how much other people have to give to your work. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good way to put it. And and it also makes, you know, it makes you think about the monograph. Right, the sole authored work in a different way. You know, I think because I've gotten into this mode of collaborating so much that when I am writing something by myself, I really try to get feedback right and, more than I might have, you know, rather than just waiting for the peer review process, I'm trying to to get some kind of conversation and collaboration going early in the process, even when it's it's still authored.

So does that mean in practical terms that you send your work out to make a point of doing that maybe early on? Yeah, yeah. And asking people for, you know, for would you mind reading this one chapter and, you know, and, and of course offering to do the same in return. Yeah. That that comes up a lot in our conversations on this show.

You know, developing that group of people who will actually do that for you because it can feel like a big ask. But I guess if you've done it for other people. Yeah. And I find it really fun. You know, if it's it's as I say, if it's something in my field. But even if it's not right, I learn a lot.

You mentioned that you've coauthored with students, which seems unusual in the humanities. What made you do that? It is, of course, the norm in the sciences, right? And not so much in the humanities. And there are concerns about, you know, in the sciences. Is it, you know, the students get sometimes abused and, you know, some the senior person puts their name on it and students do all the work or they don't get to choose their own research topics.

And I think we are more individualistic in the humanities. We want to choose our own topics and the model in the natural and physical sciences and Stem in general, and to some extent the social sciences is they don't have nearly as much freedom of choice in many cases. So yeah, so there's some concerns about that. But my conversations with students have been just have come out of conversations.

And I've co-edited a book with one of my former students. You know, this is some of these collaborations start when people are in graduate school and then they finish later. And the feral Cat book was with someone who was in graduate school and wildlife ecology initially. And then by the time we finished the book and all it was, she was out.

So I think the collaborations with students have emerged in very similar ways to collaborations with with others. Just there's something we're both interested in that we have different perspectives, different maybe strengths we bring. I can imagine we have some grad student listeners who are thinking, gee, I can't imagine my professor ever doing that, or I haven't heard of it or seen it.

And I guess I just wonder, because I haven't experienced this kind of relationship with a professor when I was a grad student. What do you think signals to a professor, that this this would work? You know what what what? Or I guess another way to ask it is, what can the grad student sort of make clear if they want to seem open to that?

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, one of the things is, you know, we get to know each other well in the graduate student mentoring. And so the first thing you know, when you choose a collaborator or someone asks you to collaborate is to make sure that you both can prioritize it to the same extent and that there's going to be some relatively fair or at least acceptable division of labor, and that people bring different strengths.

So those are the things, you know, you would think about. I certainly probably wouldn't. I mean, it less likely that you would collaborate with someone early on because just for the graduate student to feel like they're really a full participant and a full partner, you know, they'd want to be sort of at the point maybe where at least they're doing their dissertation research, where they're like, yeah, I got something to bring to this.

And then you've got to be careful that you're not like hijacking their time that they need to put into something else. So you know there has to be that sense of, of not, you know, necessarily fully equal partners because you know there's, there's always give and take. But that both people are confident that they're bringing something to it so that that's, you know, one thing I guess I would think about, but I think, yeah, if for me, it emerges just naturally out of conversations.

Right. And sometimes you've done, you know, conference paper or encyclopedia entry or something that then might lead to something else. And, you know, this edited volume, both of the books I've done with, with grad students or former grad students have been their initiative. Right. This is really cool. We should do a book. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah, I guess that takes maybe some guts or a or.


Yeah. Or like you're saying confidence and like you said before, now makes it clear that a grad student to have that sense of I have something to contribute here. Many of us fall into the role of, you know, inferior or whenever we're around our professors when we're in grad school. Yeah. Oh, I never would have dreamed of it when I was in graduate school.


Like in a million years. Yeah. Are there reasons that you wouldn't collaborate on a specific project, a kind of writing or even a time of year when you wanted to get something done? Yeah. You know, it's slow. You know, it's like double the number of authors, double the number, the number, the time that it takes. You know, it's it's not like you cut the time in half because there's two of us.


It's just like, no, everything has to happen twice because everyone has to read everything twice. And you're back and forth and, you know, you may send me. You're half of a chapter at a time when I've got a bunch of grading and I'm about to travel for a conference, and I don't get back to you for a month, and then I send you mine, and you're in the same situation, you know, so it's it's slow.

So it would not work for something where you already had a timeline unless you both were really going to prioritize that. Yeah. And sometimes I feel like sometimes I really just feel like I have questions. I want to work out that I want to be in conversation with people about. But I, you know, kind of socially sort of more theoretical things, maybe I really want to work that out.

And so there's definitely time for, you know, in certain topics and things that I really want to work out myself, even though, as I say, I tend to still be really seeking out conversations. so, you know, so the topic and the methods and sources drive it to some extent. Is this something I could do by myself with, with lots of conversations with people.

But and sometimes, you know, I have a vision like, I know what I want this to look like. And, you know, bringing in other collaborators is going to change that. And sometimes it's just really open to let's see how this forms. I was thinking of the one of the collaborative experiences I had, which was in co-teaching. I got to go teach a class here at University of Florida, and it was a lot more work.

I think both of us felt that, but I learned so much. I mean, I got to see this other person who was a much more experienced and stronger teacher than I was. I got to, you know, sort of get in inside her head a bit and, observe her. And it did affect how I then taught after. So I'm wondering if you have had that experience with writing that kind of seeing how someone else is going about writing.

Has it affected your own writing? Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you're collaborating across really different disciplines. So working, for example, with like quantitative sociologists, they have this very mechanical format for. Right. It's like, you know, abstract summary results analysis, you know, I'm like we're not doing that like you. So, so sometimes just things as a sort of kind of trivial as that, but they really shape how you think about the project.

But also, you know, just like I it's changed how I read sources, collaborating with natural scientists. I was in a journal group once. with people from psychology in the vet school a long time ago on shelter behavior. Animal shelter behavior was just really it was really interesting. There used to be canine cognition lab at UF, which was was really cool.

And I just remember listening to conversations about them taking apart scientific articles and, you know, the methodology. Can you believe they did this? And and thinking I never could have seen that. I would just read it and take it at face value. And it taught me that, you know, these scientists, just because it got published in a good journal doesn't mean that all the scientists agreed.

So things like that have been very eye opening to me about about those collaborations and then writing a book with a, with a natural scientist or a social scientist in the natural scientist sciences. Was really I just thinking about sources and and methods? I learned things that I've kept, I've kept using. I realized one thing our listeners might be wondering is, I think there's an love this question of if in the humanities coauthored things matter less or valued less.

And you obviously can't speak to every university, but what's been your experience with that? Well, yeah, I coauthored a book. So say you're going up for tenure. One coauthored book would not count the same unless maybe it had some really huge impact or something. But, I mean, if you wrote habits of the heart, that would be good enough, right?

But for mere mortals, and I think one of our senior colleagues did have a coauthored book when she was coming up for tenure or promotion and sort of waited for, you know, that's not good enough. You got to have something else, which is, again, very different from the social sciences and especially the natural sciences and engineering, where so authored books or articles are very, very rare, relatively speaking.

So, I mean, I that's something I think the humanities can only benefit from collaborations both within the humanities, within a particular discipline, but also across disciplines, across colleges. So it would be great if the rewards structure acknowledged that, that, you know, we're producing better knowledge, we become better teachers and better colleagues when we're engaged in these kinds of projects.

Yeah, you have a few decades of a career to look back on now. And so I wonder if you, from your perspective, if there are things that are clearer to you about what makes your academic writing enjoyable or when or what makes it work, and just as importantly, what you know, when does it not work? I would say collaborations have been one of the things that's made it work and made it fun.

And again, you know, not everything I do is collaboration. And typically I've got several projects going and some are collaborative and some are not. And I think that a lot of what I've liked about collaborating is sort of what I like about the research and teaching in general, which is just this sense of openness, of always learning new things.

And I say collaborating is one of the surest ways to just guarantee that you're staying fresh. You're you're excited about your work. I mean, I, I just I love talk especially with junior colleagues and graduate students. But you know, with with anyone basically who talk to me. And, you know, I'm fortunate that my interests tend to be very interdisciplinary.

Right. So wouldn't necessarily work for everyone. Obviously not every religion professor is going to be collaborating with wildlife ecologists, you know, but I think there's always people in other disciplines or in other corners of our field who who we can have these conversations with. And so if I, if I look back and think, what are the projects that have been fun?

And you know, where I feel like I've contributed something, the collaboration in the broadest sense, right. And sometimes something starts as a collaborative project and may end up, you know, so author or vice versa, you know, just because of, of time and priorities and interests that change. But all the everything that goes into it, I think is really valuable.

Yeah. What you mentioned about how it might end up differently reminds me, I think one of the reasons people hesitate on collaborative work is we're like, oh, what if what if it doesn't work out? Like it's not worth wrecking a good academic relationship or a friendship that I have, but it sounds like maybe it's not always some terrible ending.


If it even if it doesn't work out. Yeah, I have never had a collaboration that's led to any kind of personal, and I've collaborated with people who I consider good friends and also people who I collaborated with on that project and were friendly. But they're not, you know, necessarily close personally. So so there's been a wide range and there are people have collaborated with repeatedly and people I've done one off with, and there's never been a personal falling out that I can think of at all.

Yeah. So I just I haven't experienced that. Yeah. On a slightly different track. You're very productive. and you have a very busy life with kids, family, animals, lots of outdoor activity. Can you tell us about how you make all of this work together? Yeah, maybe I'm lucky in that I really enjoy writing, and so it's not something I'm inclined to avoid.

There's other parts of my job that I'm more inclined to avoid, so give me the choice of. I could read tenure files for the APB, or I could work on a new book proposal. I mean, no contest, you know, grading versus revising that chapter. One thing that I have learned or come to appreciate is the ways that teaching really feeds my research and writing.

You know, just over the years, more and more and not just graduate teaching, but undergraduate teaching and just conversations, you know, you and I go out to lunch, we talk about something interesting and it sparks something. And so I think I'm sort of open to ideas coming from lots of different places. And then the lines between what's research, what's writing, what's teaching, what's hanging out with my colleagues, you know, there it all seems like it feeds.

I mean, that's sunny, a little more idyllic than it really is, but so it's hard to fit. Writing in deadlines are really helpful. Having assignments and deadlines is really helpful. So sometimes I'll do a conference paper just because it gives me a deadline. And I I've been meaning to write something about this or get a start. And if I submit a proposal and then have to do a paper, it gets me going.

It's like when you're at school and you've got an assignment, you got to get it done. So I think I sometimes need that external structure, which I think we all do. Or if just, you know, that conference is coming up, you better write that paper. Right. There's a couple of questions we ask all guests. One is what is a writing practice or habit that is working for you now?

Yeah, that's a great I mean, when I was reading your question, this is a great. And I saw like, oh God, I'm not I'm not one of those people who has rules, you know, write for two hours every morning. I guess I'm, I'm also I have the luxury of, you know, being tenured as, you know, not having to jump through certain hoops that, you know, different stage of my career.

I certainly did. And there's a lot more stress involved. So I'm able to sort of follow what I'm excited about. And and that is it feels really nice. I can be generous with myself and generous with my students and my colleagues that I, you know, sometimes can maybe do something that, like this collaboration I'm doing with an undergraduate right now wouldn't have been something I would have thought of myself that she heard about and was excited about it, and we ran with it.


And that's if I were worried about getting tenure. I might have said, oh, I can't do that. I got to get my book done. So I have the privilege right of this, the luxury of doing this so, you know, it's not really a habit but a habit. It's like I get excited about something I, you know, I run with it.

Or if someone else presents something that seems interesting, I run with it. Yeah. So did you. Does that mean you noticed yourself thinking differently about writing post tenure? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, so when I first got tenure, well, when my first book came out and I sort of thought, okay, you know, now I've got the nail in the coffin here, I'll get tenure.

I had a baby like the same year my first book came out. And I remember thinking, well, it's a good thing that came out because I'm so exhausted. There's no way I'm ever writing anything again in my life. That's it. And of course, that wasn't how it went, but boy, it felt like that for a year or two.

Just, you know, it's like my life goal is to be a Stegner associate professor. but then I started to get excited, interested in stuff again, but it definitely felt, it was definitely liberating, right. And that I didn't have a strict timeline. And also, I, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm all over the place in terms of topic, method, etc. and that is a luxury also that I've been able to partly, you know, and religion were a very interdisciplinary discipline.

And so we have we have that freedom maybe more than some other disciplines. But also I think my work is particularly interdisciplinary. And so that's, you know, been a real luxury. Another thing we're asking guests is what is something you wish you had known about writing earlier in your career? It'll all be fine. Well, I think one thing I've realized that there's rhythms.

And so, you know, like that moment I had after, you know, I'm like, with a baby and with this book, I'm like, I just want to lie on the sofa and sleep for ten years that I've learned that that now, in retrospect, I can look back and say, of course I was going to, you know, I needed some time to recover and not think about, you know, I didn't have the next new project right down the pipeline at that point at all.

And those rhythms are really normal, and they can be very productive. Right. That time of like, I, you know, I spent a lot of time just like sitting there with my sleeping baby, reading stuff, just reading things I hadn't read before. And that ended up sparking cool things. Although at the time I was just thinking of I've never read on the Origin of Species.

I literally read On the Origin of Species with my baby in my lap over a period of weeks. So I think just that idea that there's a rhythm and just because you, you know, there'll be some years when you'll do a lot and some years when you're just like kind of, you know, reflecting and, and that that's completely normal.

And that's how you do good work. Right, is not to force it. And also some projects take a lot longer than others, you know. And so I guess just to sort of be again, be generous with with yourself, I wish I had been a little more generous with my younger self about about some of that and also some things that I started never got finished.

You know, I have I have article proposals and book proposals and grant proposals that like never I never set out, never because I lost interest or I realized this isn't really worth the effort. And so I think now I'm, I'm better at just saying you know, I spent a bunch of time on this and it's just it's not where I want to be going.

And so that's obviously not always possible. Sometimes you do have a ten year clock or something coming up, but I guess I wish yeah, just that I had, you know like now with, you know, hindsight realize I wasn't done after my first book, but I kind of felt like it at the time. Yeah, that's helpful to hear. I mean, so many people I know seem to be in kind of the rush hour of their career where one thing keeps coming after another.

But I imagine for many of us going to hit some period where there's going to be a lull or even a lack of desire, followed by the question of will, I feel desire again. Yeah. And it's it's good to hear, you know, that you've sort of many people, I'm sure, have experienced the up and down. And that's where, you know, honestly, something like joining a journal group or you're talking to canine psychologists that didn't lead to directly to any kind of publication.

But it was super fun and it just got my brain going in all kinds of ways and indirectly led to the the coauthored book on cats, ironically, you know, so sometimes, again, that sort of being willing to follow something you're excited about without I guess that's, you know, sort of, you know, it's a cliche, but sometimes it is about the process and that, again, is a luxury of being post tenure and having, you know, having a job you like.

You're not on the market. You're you're able to sort of relax a little bit and to pursue something that may or may not pan out into a concrete results and sometimes pursue things that you don't think will pan out. But they turn out to be really productive. You know, I started talking with natural scientists because I kept getting invited to their classes to, oh, we just want someone to give a lecture on environmental ethics.

And I gave so many lectures on environmental ethics and like, well, if ecology and forestry classes and, and they were always so excited about and I was just like, really, this is so ordinary for me. But wow, what you're doing is really exciting to me. And those led to some really cool collaborations and, and, you know, NSF grant and a book and articles.

But I didn't know that at the time. You know, I wasn't it was just sort of these are fun collaborations and fun conversations. And I like visiting your class, and I like inviting you to visit my class. And we didn't know where it was going. And so to be able to sort of just follow that is is really fun.

And yeah, I hope you get to do that too. Yeah, that sounds great. It's also reassuring to hear that not everything, not every scrap has been used. I feel like there's this, like, kind of myth among writers that, oh, don't worry, even if you're, you know, some part of the manuscript doesn't go into this book, you'll use it later.

And maybe that is the case, but I certainly have things that I've loved, that I've written that look like they're really just in the dustbin for a while anyway. Yeah. So I don't know if that's something comforting that a lot of people like to tell themselves that, oh, everything can eventually be used. But at least in my experience, that's not it's not totally the way it's working out right now.

I mean, what gets used is what you learned, you know. Right. And what you thought about. But oh, I have I have so many hundreds, thousands of pages of stuff I've written that, you know, things I was excited about. It's I have a book proposals that after was just like, I'm not writing this book like, this isn't happening.

I'm not even writing an article on this. I was excited for a while, and then something else came up that I was more excited about. Or that I needed to do. And it's. And I have lots of things I've done. Actually, another collaborative thing I done I did was a friend of mine from high school, this natural collagist, who works on Latin America and he did a very cool dissertation and book on street children in Brazil.

And then he did an edited volume on Latin American children and Latin American culture and society. And he asked me if I would just do you want to write something for this? And I talked to a friend of mine who and we wrote a really fun chapter on children and Central American wars completely, you know, had nothing to do with religion.


She's a she's a religion scholar who works on pre-colonial Mesoamerica. It was like totally out of it was super fun. It was completely a one off. We did a lot of work. I mean, we put a lot more work into that because we had such a we were playing catch up. But those are, you know, that's not like one coauthored book chapter.

It's not a particularly, you know, high payoff kind of result, but it was such a fun project. So I guess that's kind of a habit is if you know, something exciting comes up, it's okay to pursue, even if it's not strategically, it's not necessarily what I would advise. If you came to me as a tenured, you know, I have the opportunity to write a coauthored article in a in a edited book completely outside my field, like, okay, get your book done first and then do that later, you know?

Yeah, but fun when you can get to it. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Anna. This has been really fun to get to talk to you. Yeah. Thank you. It's been great. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Thanks for listening to writing it, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at writing at Pod and subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.