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BU Today 2006
Edition of 28 November December 2006
Students Strut Smarts
in Brownstone
by Chris Berdik
These days, the voice of undergraduate scholarship
at BU is getting a little louder, though no less learned, thanks
to a revamped Brownstone Journal, a collection of student research,
analysis, and translation that has been published on and off
since 1982.
“We’ve made leaps and bounds,” says Kristin Weiland (CAS’08),
executive editor of Brownstone, which reappeared in 2005 after
a three-year publishing hiatus. Since then, the journal has
grown in almost every way — more faculty reviewing papers and
nudging students to submit their work, new funding for a more
professional look, and more of a presence both on campus and
online, where the journal now posts Web-only articles that cannot
be crammed into the 200-page print volume. The submission deadline
for the 2007 edition is December 20, although late submissions
will be considered until mid-February.
While the number of pieces making the cut depends on the length
of those selected, last year’s volume had about 20 contributions,
including research into the Turkish massacre of Armenians in
1915, a paper on the archaeological remains of an ancient city
in what is now Iraq, and a survey of toxins that had spread
through the oceanic food chain to fish consumed by humans. The
journal also publishes works of translation and several photographs
and other illustrations by students.
Competition for a spot in the table of contents is getting
stiffer. Last year, Brownstone received about 200 submissions,
up from about 100 two years ago. This year, Weiland says, “we
expect to double that.” Both she and Zachary Bos, Brownstone’s
staff advisor, attribute the journal’s resurgence to the leadership
of last year’s executive editor, Rachel Eyler (CAS’06), who
built relationships with faculty to extend the journal’s reach,
recruited freshmen and sophomores to bolster staff continuity,
and met with University administrators to win sponsorship by
the Office of the Provost, via the Undergraduate Research Opportunities
Program.
“She made the case that if we want to be a serious research
institution, we should have this dimension of academic work,”
says Bos, the administrative coordinator for the CAS Core Curriculum.
“And now, with that institutional support, the students on staff
feel like they’re stepping into something established, rather
than having to create something out of whole cloth. I think
they take it more seriously.”
The journal’s staff includes 18 section editors, who secure
faculty readers and solicit research papers from the University’s
colleges and departments. During an intense week and a half
in February, each submission is read by three staff members
and given a ranking from one to five. Then, a select number
of papers are passed on to volunteer faculty readers for further
comments, questions, and requests for information, such as expanded
footnotes to help explain research to nonexpert readers.
Indeed, making University research accessible is one of the
journal’s main goals, according to Weiland. “We want to share
the outstanding work that students produce at this university,”
she says. “We hope to foster a community of research, scholarship,
and intellectualism in an environment that is otherwise torn
by the many distractions that are part of university life.“
Another goal is to give students with an interest in editorial
work an introduction to the world of publications. “They learn
things like how to make suggestions without imposing their will
on the writer,” says Bos. “They learn diplomacy.” Staff also
arrange for seminars on such skills as proofreading and the
publishing software Quark.
Once the final lineup of articles is decided in March, production
work begins, and a new Brownstone Journal is typically completed
and ready for distribution by late April or early May. Weiland
hopes that this year will bring a more diverse range of submissions
beyond the journal’s traditional mainstays: the College of Arts
and Sciences and the University Professors Program.
In the meantime, she says, “we’ll continue to work to ensure
that we remain a visible institution on campus, to foster that
sense of an academic community, and to get our name out there
so that students will look for the journal at our next release
date.”
© BU Today. Original at http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/news-cms/news/?dept=4&id=41945&template=4l.
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