Actually, it’s the same research but it will be published in two different books – the German dissertation which needs to be published to fulfill all requirements for the title “Doctor”, and an academic monograph, published in the Routledge Research in Early Modern History series. The research on depositions of monarchs on the British Isles and in Scandinavia, 1500-1700, has now been part of my daily life for ten years (although I did submit in 2016, and defended in 2017). It really is time to share the complete work with the academic community. Parts and ideas of the whole had been presented in journal articles, book chapters, and uncounted conference presentations, but now it’s time to publish it – let it leave the nest, take flight…

But first, the German version has to be edited: I need to include comments from my dissertation committee, add some of the new research to it (a few books which I could only reference as “xyz is working on this right now” are now published, and can be referenced properly), shorten the whole thing a bit, put some of the ideas which I presented in footnotes in the main text, add the acknowledgements, and finally, check everything again in regards to citation, format, the next-to-last typos (the last typos are only found after publication – it’s an unwritten rule of publication), and make it pretty.

The German version is around 200,000 words (400 pages), so it will be lot but doable.
At the same time, I am also re-writing the research into an (English) academic monograph with only half of the words (aiming for c. 110,000 words). Because, let’s face it, my audience will mostly come from scholars interested in British and/or Scandinavian history, and they prefer often English over German. Also, an academic monograph is quite a different thing than a dissertation. It was actually pretty easy to decide what to leave out: the research on the deposed monarchs, the case studies, needed to be presented in much more detail for the dissertation than they will be necessary for my argument in Deposing Monarchs.

My deadlines are also pretty clear: I want to complete the German publication as long as I am still in Mainz which means until mid of September 2019. And Routledge expects my manuscript in mid of December 2019, although I want to have most of it re-written also by mid of September to give it to reviewers and linguistic editors.

So, as usual, I have much on my plate, and I am re-activating this blog after five years to keep me accountable, and share a bit about this experience of re-writing, editing, and publishing research, both in German and in English. Also, I was very much inspired by Natalia Nowakowska’s blog she wrote while writing a book! Let’s see how it goes…