For many early career scholars in the humanities and social sciences, it’s just a given: You turn your dissertation into a book. Not only that, but you begin doing so the moment you complete the Ph.D.

M ost books we read — whether textbooks, reference works, academic studies, histories, or fictional narratives — are organized into chapters. These divisions, as the scholar Nicholas Dames explains in ...

The dissertation proposal and the specialty exam serve different purposes and should be viewed as separate activities, even though often executed concurrently. The dissertation proposal marks the ...