HSS Humanities Center Book Institute

The HSSHC Book Institute convened in June 2025 with six Fellows from across HSS. They developed concrete plans for completing their second books, and networked with publishers from scholarly presses.

Photo Credit: Benjamin Kahan

Making the transition from a dissertation to a first book and from a first to a second book can be challenging. HSS Humanities Center's Book Institute (formerly the Second Book Institute) is here to help you overcome writing obstacles, finish your manuscript, and navigate book publication.

The Book Institute assists faculty in monograph-based disciplines at every stage of the writing process, from formulating and completing the manuscript to publishing the book. Fellows at the Book Institute receive detailed feedback on their work in progress, peer mentorship, and guidance from editors at university presses.

The HSS Humanities Center's Book Institute facilitates the promotion of Assistant Professors to Associate and of Associate Professors to Full. We welcome all tenured and tenure-track faculty to apply for the limited spaces available each year at the Institute: however, we give preference to Associate Professors and Advanced Assistant Professors nearing promotion. Attending the Institute means committing to reading and commenting on the work of other Fellows.

The fourth Book Institute will convene from Monday, June 1, to Friday, June 5, 2026. Book Institute Fellows will receive detailed feedback on one chapter and the larger project, mentorship from peers, guidance from editors at university presses, and, above all, reassurance that they don’t have to go it alone. Both during and after the Book Institute, Fellows will be embedded in a support structure of faculty peers and mentors, supporting professors in book-based disciplines through every step of the writing process from manuscript formulation and completion to publication. The Institute’s mentors will lead workshop reviews of Fellows’ manuscripts and assist them in developing concrete plans to publish their books.

If you’re interested in becoming a 2026 Fellow, please prepare the following materials to send to the BI’s co-directors Pallavi Rastogi prastogi@lsu.edu and Katelyn Knox katelynknox@lsu.edu by Friday, March 27 at 5.00 pm:

A 3-page CV
A one -page letter of interest in participating in the Institute

We will accommodate up to six participants and will prioritize as many different HSS departments as possible. Preference will be given to associate professors and advanced assistant professors.

Feel free to reach out to the Institute's co-directors, Pallavi Rastogi (prastogi@lsu.edu) and Katelyn Knox (katelynknox@lsu.edu) if you are interested in becoming a Fellow or have any questions.

2026 HSS Humanities Center Book Institute Fellows

Asiya Alam

Asiya Alam is an associate professor at the department of history where she teaches courses in South Asian and world history. Her book Women, Islam and Familial Intimacy in Colonial South Asia (Brill, 2021) explored the history of Muslim feminism in colonial India through a range of archival material, including novels, pamphlets, commentaries, and journalistic essays. Her current research examines the history of childhood in South Asia. Her research has been published in Modern Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, and Journal of Urdu Studies.

Hannah Bacon

Hannah Bacon is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University, where she teaches political and social philosophy, philosophy of law, bioethics, and classes cross-listed with the women, gender and sexualities studies department. Her research is in the interrelated fields of critical phenomenology, social and political theory, and philosophy of law/carceral theory. Her current book project provides a phenomenological account of how systemic political violence affects lived experiences of time, undermines human relationships, and wounds human's innate relational capacities. Recent research is forthcoming in journals such as Theory & Event, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, and PhiloSOPHIA.

Jessica Blake

Jessica Blake is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University. She is working on a manuscript, Market Women on the Colonial Gulf Coast, about the contributions of eighteenth-century enslaved and emancipated women. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History and Early American Studies.

Jimmy Butts

Jimmy Butts is the Director of the University Writing Program in the Department of English at Louisiana State University. He received his Ph.D. from the transdisciplinary program in Rhetorics, Communication, and information Design at Clemson University in 2013. His research interests encompass postmodern composition strategies, new media, rhetorical criticism, defamiliarization, and writing pedagogy, with a sustained focus on digital rhetoric and electronic textualities. His multimodal scholarship has been published in Textshop Experiments, The KB Journal, Itineration, Pre-Text, The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects, and The Cybertext Yearbook. He is the author of Strangely Rhetorical: Composing Differently With Novelty Devices (Utah State University Press, 2023). He is currently working on a book project titled A Rhetorical Grimoire: How We Compose the World with Language and Magic. Additionally, he is editing a forthcoming collection, The Sophist’s Cookbook. Prior to joining LSU, he taught at Charleston County High Schools, Winthrop University, Clemson University, and Wake Forest University.

Saumya Lal

Saumya Lal is an Assistant Professor of English at Louisiana State University. She received her PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her research interests include global Anglophone literatures and cultures, postcolonial theory, affect theory, literary ethics, and peace and conflict studies. She is currently completing a monograph that examines the ambiguities of empathy in literary portrayals of political conflicts in postcolonial Africa and South Asia. This project has been supported by the Provost’s Fund Big Ideas in Arts & Humanities Grant at LSU and the Mellon Ph.D. Fellowship at UMass Amherst, among other awards. Her work has been published in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Textual Practice. Her forthcoming publications include essays in edited collections in the Routledge South Asian Literature and MLA Options for Teaching series respectively.

Helena Moura Fietz

Helena Fietz is a medical anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of disability, care practices, family obligation, and public policy in Brazil and the US. She examines how marginalized individuals and families navigate systems of care shaped by inequality, weak institutions, and uneven access to rights. Centering caregivers’ and disabled people’s experiences, her research explores how disability rights and care policies are unevenly realized..

HSS Humanities Center Book Institute Directors

Headshot of Pallavi Rastogi

Pallavi Rastogi (Co-Director)

Dr. Pallavi Rastogi is the J.F. Taylor Endowed Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her first book, Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa, was published by Ohio State University in 2008. Dr. Rastogi’s second book, Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. Her co-edited collection of essays, entitled Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature, published by the Modern Languages Association (MLA) appeared in print in March 2024. She has also written widely on South African, South Asian, and South Asian diasporic literature as well as multiethnic British and American literature in various journals and anthologies. She serves as Associate Editor for The South Asian Review and is currently working on a book on minority non-South Asian representations of the Indian subcontinent and an edited collection on Asians in Louisiana under advance contract with LSU Press.

Katelyn Knox

Katelyn Knox (Co-Director)

Katelyn Knox. Katelyn Knox is the Jacques Arnaud Associate Professor of French at Louisiana State University. Her research focuses on sub-Saharan African literature and the literature, music, and cultures of immigration, Black France, and Afropea. She is the author of Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France (Liverpool UP) and numerous articles. The co-author of The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook, as well as a blog with info on scholarly productivity and writing tips, she is committed to mentoring junior scholars and demystifying academia's hidden curricula.