Demystifying Academic Publishing: A Workshop with Robert Dreesen (Cambridge University Press)

Join us on Friday, May 1 for a workshop with Robert Dreesen, Publisher at Cambridge University Press.

In this session, you’ll learn how to navigate the academic publishing landscape, including:

  • Crafting a compelling book proposal that stands out
  • Identifying the right press and approaching editors effectively
  • Understanding the peer-review process
  • Negotiating contracts with confidence
  • Common pitfalls to avoid (and tips for first-time authors)

Whether you’re preparing your first monograph, revising a dissertation, or exploring your next project, this is a rare opportunity to ask questions and gain practical strategies from an experienced acquisitions editor.

Robert Dreesen has been an editor for more than twenty-five years – in trade publishing at Penguin and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and for the past sixteen years in academic publishing at the Press. He publishes books in economics broadly, seeking cutting-edge and useful research that contributes to the Press’s award-winning portfolio, both theoretical and applied: political economy, econometrics, methods, models, tools and techniques, economic history. He also commissions political theory. He is often looking for synthetic books, scholarly but with broad appeal that expand the circumference of research, of knowledge. More generally, he commissions trade books across the social sciences.

Registration: Book Workshop

Book Workshop with Robert Dreesen, Cambridge University Press • Friday, May 1, 2026 • 12 to 2 PM • Pardee School of Global Studies, 121 Bay State Road

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