My Grant-Writing Super Power

Photo by Kamran Chaudhry on Unsplash

Just kidding, I don’t have a grant-writing super power and, to be honest, the thing I have in mind is not a power so much as it is a lesson I have yet to learn.

The lesson is: when you’re considering a grant, you need to look not just at the call for proposals, but also at the specific method by which you’re going to submit your proposal.

Some proposals get submitted by just attached a PDF to an email, while others get submitted through an online form or an application portal. In any case, make sure you not only know what is being asked for not just in the call for proposals, but in the submission method as well.

For example, I recently found myself in the position of submitting a grant recently where I had written out a detailed project narrative, timeline, and impact statement, totaling nine pages. But when I went into the application portal for this particular grant (for the first time, mind you) I found that each of those sections was limited to 1,500 characters each.

Not 1,500 words, 1,500 characters.

As a result, I had very quickly cut out most of my lovingly crafted prose to make it fit in the space allotted. I could have probably saved myself quite a bit of writing time, and a significant amount of headache right before the deadline, by doing just a little bit more due diligence at the beginning of the whole process.

I wish I could say this was the first time this has happened to me; it wasn’t. But maybe you—and I—can learn from my mistakes and do just a little bit better next time.

On Grant Writing

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Writing grants is one of those things that we (or at least some of us) in the worlds of higher education and non-profits do a lot. There are obvious benefits to being good at grant writing, which might help you to fund your research, an initiative in your department, of your very salary, depending on where you’re working.

And yet, even though grant writing is important, I don’t recall getting a whole lot of formal training in it as part of my journey through graduate school. I did get some good advice from my dissertation adviser—that I should mirror key language from the call for proposals in my application—that I still use to this day. But what about putting together the proposal itself? What are the key components that make up a good grant narrative?

For that, I’ve been using the same resource for the past ten years: Karen Kelsky’s Foolproof Grant Template. I’ve gone back to it more times than I can count, and I’ve had a fair amount of success in winning grants (if I do say so myself) as a result. One of the things that I like about it is that it gives you a framework for writing your grant narrative as a narrative, i.e., as a story. To me, that’s much more compelling than the dry or disorganized proposals that people often put together.

Which is to say: although I have been rejected for plenty of grants over the last ten years, I’ve also won quite a few. I think the Foolproof Grant Template has worked well for me, and I hope it works well for you, too.

Interview: Eric Wat, Love Your Asian Body

I’m excited to say that my interview with Eric Wat about his wonderful book Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles went up yesterday at Nursing Clio just in time for World AIDS Day! I first wrote about Eric’s book her over a year ago, in a post about what I had read during the summer of 2022. I actually interviewed him around that time, but the fall semester started, I was back in the classroom, and I got hit with what felt like a freight train of service responsibilities (no accident that I haven’t posted here in over a year).

Thankfully (and also sadly) the interview is still very relevant. Eric talks about how his personal story is intertwined with the activist history that he documents, why he chose to write the book when he did (tl;dr because Trump), and how it speaks to the period of anti-queer backlash that we’re living through (that’s the sad part of it still being relevant over a year later).

In any case, I’m happy that the interview is finally out in the world, because I can’t say enough good things about this book. And I’m not alone in my regard—Love Your Asian Body won the 2023 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History.

Eric Wat holds his award from the Association for Asian American Studies for Love Your Asian Body.

There is so much work to be done on documenting histories of AIDS activism in communities of color, and to my knowledge this is the first book to do that for Asian American communities. For that reason I found it really useful when I was writing up my chapter “The AIDS Crisis” in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States, and I look forward to revisiting it again and again in the future.

What I’ve Been Reading: September 2022

It’s probably no surprise that I read a lot for research and teaching, but I also try to make time every day to read for pleasure as well. Sometimes the two even overlap! Here’s what I’ve enjoyed reading lately, and what I’m planning to read next.

What I’ve Read

Joseph Osmundson, Virology

I didn’t know quite what to expect when I picked up Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between over the summer, but I know I didn’t expect this book to speak to me in the way that it did. Osmundson uses queer theory to give us a new way of thinking about viruses and viral epidemics, one that rejects metaphors of war and embraces the forms of connection and community that promise to make us truly resilient. This is also a deeply personal book that spoke to my own experience of growing up as a gay man in the shadow of AIDS, and what that has meant for the ways that I understand my own sexuality. And if you’ve missed Osmundson’s writing on monkeypox, which extends much of what he has to say in Virology, that’s worth checking out as well.

Eric Wat, Love Your Asian Body

While the last decade or so has brought lots of books and films about the history of AIDS (Theodore Kerr and Alexandra Juhasz call this the “AIDS crisis revisitation”—more on that below), far too little of that has focused on the experiences and activism of communities of color in the epidemic—this is part of the reason that I wrote To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS. And within that silence, there has been almost no literature on Asian American responses to AIDS. That’s why I was thrilled to see Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles hit bookstore shelves. Wat’s book is not just conceptually rich, it’s also full of the stories of bold activists who made it their mission to provide life-saving services and care to a community that was often overlooked in responses to AIDS. This is an eminently readable book that I could see assigning to undergraduate students in all kinds of courses.

P. Djèlí Clark, Ring Shout

I love genre fiction, especially when it deals in themes of race and sexuality, and Ring Shout did not disappoint. Clark takes the story of the second Klan in Macon, Georgia and gives it a horror twist. The main characters are an avenging band of Black freedom fighters, including a stone butch World War I veteran, who wield both magic and military skill to fight the hooded forces of hatred. I found it to be a quick read, in part because it’s on the shorter side as a novella, but also because I couldn’t put it down. I liked this a lot better than the book version of Lovecraft Country, which felt like a story about Black people written for a white audience. Ring Shout ends with the promise of a sequel that I hope we get to see, and I would love to see this book adapted for TV as well.

Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

I knew of Chee as an essayist and a veteran of ACT UP, thanks to a piece he wrote in June 2020 about Covid and the history of AIDS, but it was a mention in Virology that led me pick up How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I’m glad I did. Chee relates the sense of outside- and inbetweenness that he felt both living in Seoul and Maine as the mixed-race child of a Korean father and Anglo mother, and as a gay adolescent in the 1970s and 80s. He writes quite a bit about his time spent in New York, but it’s his stories about San Francisco in the late 1980s, and his anecdote about buying a dead man’s boots at a sidewalk sale, that will stick with me.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

I’m teaching our department’s graduate seminar on History, Memory & the Public this semester and, as before, we started the course with Trouillot. I wouldn’t say that the book is dense, but it can be abstract—after all, Trouillot was articulating a theory of how historical memory works. Some of his references—to Fukuyama, to deconstruction—seem very much of the moment in which he was writing. I also don’t think his criticism of academic historians as detached from pressing political conversations of the day rings quite as true anymore but, as I pointed out to the students in my class, that’s probably because several generations of historians have been trained over the past twenty-five years in part by reading Trouillot.

What’s Up Next

James Hannaham, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

I just started reading Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, a novel about a “Blatina” trans woman from Brooklyn who gets out of prison after twenty years and returns home to confront her family and a neighborhood (Fort Greene) that has changed dramatically in her absence.

Emily Bass, To End a Plague

I’ve been meaning to read To End a Plague: America’s Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa because it intersects with the story about ACT UP Philadelphia and the global AIDS movement that I tell in To Make the Wounded Whole. I’m excited to see what I learn, and hopefully to get some ideas for future projects!

THOMAS—A Deeper Dive

Photo by Drew Farwell on Unsplash

Today I want to take a deeper dive into the THOMAS worksheet (Word version | PDF version), which I talked a little bit about in my post Teaching History: First Week of Class Resources. This is an assignment that I developed for graduate students based on Danna Agmon’s THOMAS framework for analyzing historical scholarship. THOMAS stands for Topic, Historiography, Organization, Methodology, Argument, and Significance.

I often pair this with Caleb McDaniel’s “How to Read for History” because I think it’s important to not assume that students already know how to be successful in our courses. This is no less true for graduate students, who are generally my target audience for this assignment. While McDaniel gives them key insight into how to read for their seminars, the THOMAS worksheet tells them what to look for. In other words, this assignment teaches them how to do the kind of reading that we sometimes refer to as “gutting” a book.

This is an enormously important skill for students to have. It can make reading for courses more efficient, not to mention preparation for comprehensive exams. I also sometimes frame the THOMAS worksheet as scaffolding for more involved assignments. When students are tasked with a historiographical essay, I encourage them to dissect their list of books using the THOMAS method. Students can then use the completed worksheets to more easily draw out points of comparison, giving them a starting point for analysis.

However, I’ve found that it’s not enough to tell students what they’re looking for; you also have to tell them where and how to look. This is disciplinary knowledge that has become second nature to many of us over time, and there’s no good reason not to share this with our students. To that end, I developed this handout, which describes where to find each of these elements, and what to look for.

I’ve also recorded the following videos—the first gives an overview of this framework, and the others explain each element in detail:

After I’ve graded all the worksheets for a given reading, I’ll generally also share my own version as a model. And although I do generally use this assignment with graduate students, it could also work with advanced undergraduates with the right amount of support. For example, you could start by giving students a partially completed handout and having them fill in the rest, or have them complete the worksheet in groups during a single class session.

Have you used something similar to teach reading strategies? Do you have your own method for “gutting” a book? Share them in the comments!

3 Takeaways from A Primer for Teaching Digital History

I was one of the unlikely many who caught Covid for the first time during the BA.5 wave this summer. While I was isolating at home, I had the chance to read A Primer for Teaching Digital History by Jen Guiliano, from the Design Principles for Teaching History series by Duke University Press. I had picked it up casually, but ended up being engrossed in it. It’s accessible, well-written, and full of great ideas—all of the things you want from a book on teaching.

Even though I’m not teaching digital history any time soon, I still found that Guiliano offered a lot of insights that I could apply to my teaching right now. Here are three of the big takeaways from A Primer for Teaching Digital History that I’ll be taking into my classroom this semester.

Student Collaborator’s Bill of Rights

This semester I’m building my graduate course on History, Memory, and the Public, which I teach on themes of race and memory in the United States, around a major public-facing project. A group of faculty from FIU and University of Miami have been working on a proposal for A People’s Guide to Miami, to be included in the A People’s Guide series from University of California Press, which sounded like just the right type of project for students in this course to help out with.

The students in my course will be writing A People’s Guide to Miami entries for possible use in both the book proposal and the final publication. I like to use projects like this one in my public history courses because it gives students a chance to apply what we’re reading to their work “in the field.”

However, before reading Guiliano’s book I hadn’t heard of the Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights. This set of principles, which is itself based on the Collabortors’ Bill of Rights, describes what students should be able to expect in terms of compensation, credit, and control when participating in a project led by faculty. We will discuss both sets of principles early on in the semester, and, students will be able to opt out of contributing to the People’s Guide if they so choose.

The Importance of Peer Review

Guiliano points out that peer review is about more than students giving and getting feedback; it also fosters a sense of classroom community. However, I haven’t done much peer review in the past because, in my experience, students have a hard time giving each other useful feedback.

Guiliano offers a couple of solutions for this. One is to provide student peer reviewers with a checklist of assignment requirements. Another is to ask student peer reviewers what they would do differently rather than asking them to assess a peer’s work in terms of its quality.

With these strategies in mind, I’m asking students to turn in a draft of their People’s Guide entry in early November for peer review, so that they can read one another’s work, get some valuable feedback, and make revisions accordingly by the end of the semester. And of course assessing one another’s work will also help students to better understand the assignment for themselves.

Getting Better is What Matters

When we talk about pedagogy, whether it’s in a faculty workshop or in a blog post, we’re often talking about the very best version of our teaching. I know that I can find this to be kind of discouraging, because it sounds like everyone else is brilliant in the classroom, whereas all I can often think about are the things I could have done better or differently. And sure enough, while reading A Primer for Teaching Digital History I thought a lot about my teaching missteps in the past.

That’s why I was grateful that Guiliano ended her book this way: “Don’t forget that what makes you a great teacher is your desire to continually improve your own pedagogy.”

This was so reassuring! It’s a good reminder that if you’re in the position to hear about how lots of other people are teaching, then you’re probably doing something right yourself, even if that right thing is just to get a little bit better at it.

Setting Norms for Class Discussion

Photo credit: Headway

This summer I taught a six-week graduate seminar on Florida’s Black history. The course represented a couple of firsts for me: my first time teaching a course focused specifically on the subject, my first time teaching a graduate seminar online, and my first time setting intentional norms for class discussions.

I got the idea from a Lumen Circles fellowship program on evidence-based teaching that I participated in last spring. It was geared toward undergraduate instruction, and the only courses coming up on my calendar were for graduate students. So when we got to talking about using discussion norms to foster belonging in the undergraduate classroom I thought, Graduate seminars are a different beast—this doesn’t really apply to me.

Then I remembered graduate courses that I’ve taught in the past where discussion norms would have been really helpful. (And if I’m being honest, I would have benefited from such norms when I was a graduate student who sometimes confused snarky comments with intellectual engagement.) My teaching often focuses on the historical context for hot-button issues, and here class discussions can get passionate—sometimes to the point that feelings are hurt, students disengage, and managing the classroom becomes stressful. The problem in these cases was not that students disagreed with or challenged one another, but that the tenor of our conversations got in the way of genuine listening and learning. In retrospect, we really could have used an agreed-upon set of discussion norms to get us back on track.

So for my online seminar this summer, I made setting these norms one of our first tasks as a class. First, I asked students to write a short discussion board post responding to the following questions:

  • What does respect look like in this space?
  • How can we make this space where we can feel brave to speak up and engage with each other? How should we respond when we feel uncomfortable?
  • What expectations do we wish to set so that we can all make the most of our time together?
  • Finally, how do we want to respond when someone breaks a community expectation? What will accountability look like in our space?

Then I asked them to annotate and comment on a set of draft discussion ground rules adapted from Juan C. Garibay, “Creating a Positive Classroom Climate for Diversity.” Once they were done, I incorporated their feedback into the final set of ground rules.

I have to say that discussions—all of which were done using audio and video comments on VoiceThread—went exceptionally well. Having discussion norms in place also helped me to feel more secure as an instructor, because I knew that I had taken care to set us up for success as a learning community. This is something that I’ll definitely be carrying forward in my teaching.

If you’d like to do the same, feel free to borrow any and all of this. If you click “File” and “Make a copy” on the discussion ground rules Google Doc above, you can save it to your Google Drive account to edit for your own purposes. And of course this is just one way to engage students in setting ground rules for your learning space—feel free to share your own approaches in the comments below.

Teaching History: First Week of Class Resources

Photo Credit: Brett Jordan

One of the things that I’ve tried to do more and more since I started teaching is to focus on what I think of as the foundations of history education. This includes the habits of mind that develop over the course of our training, which few—if any—of our students will have mastered.

This annotated list of resources includes readings and activities that aim to build students’ foundational skills in the study of history. I’m calling these “first week of class resources” because that’s when I often introduce them, but they work well for any point in the quarter or semester, no matter what kind of history you teach.

Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, “What Does It Mean to Think Historically?”

You can assign this as a short reading for the first week of the semester, but I often make the 5 Cs the focus of a mini-lecture in a face-to-face course or a series of videos for a hybrid or online course. As you go throughout the semester, call back to these when your course content illustrates any one of these themes.

W. Caleb McDaniel, “How to Read for History”

This is one that I wish I had been assigned as an undergrad or even in grad school—hey, if I’m being honest, I still have to fight the urge to read every book from cover to cover. McDaniel offers helpful advice for how to read history monographs effectively by skimming for key information and reading in three discrete stages. This works great for an undergraduate course if you’re assigning one or more monographs, and I’ve used it with graduate students as well.

W. Caleb McDaniel, “How to Discuss a Book for History”

Another really useful reading from McDaniel, one that is well-suited for seminars and other discussion-based courses. Just as students often need guidance in how to read monographs, they often need guidance in how to discuss them. This post makes explicit our expectations for doing so.

Cornell Note Taking System

I’ll confess that this isn’t something that I’ve assigned before, although I have talked quite a bit with students about taking notes in class. It seems to me that a large number of students don’t take notes in my lecture courses, and I suspect that it’s not just me. It may be that note-taking is no longer being taught in lower grades, and so students don’t know how to take notes. In any case, this page explains the Cornell note-taking system, and links to a publicly available Canvas module with exercises, assessments, and reflections.

PAPER Worksheet (Word version | PDF version)

If there’s one skill that is absolutely foundational to history education, it’s primary source analysis. However, most students don’t know quite what we mean when we ask them to analyze a historical document. This simple worksheet, based on Patrick Rael’s “How to Read a Primary Source,” breaks that analysis down into five sets of questions that students can use as a first step toward longer assignments.

THOMAS Worksheet (Word version | PDF version)

I’ll talk more about this in a later post, but this is another worksheet that I developed, this time based on Danna Agmon’s THOMAS framework for analyzing historical scholarship. I will say that I’ve had more success in using this with graduate students than with undergraduates, but with the appropriate support, I think this could work well for advanced undergraduates.

Paul B. Sturtevant, “What Can You Do with That History Degree?”

In a better world, we wouldn’t have to constantly be defending the value of humanities education. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. With that in mind, you might want to spend some time in the first week of the semester talking with students about what comes after a degree in history. This article, which uses federal employment data, shows that history majors are competitive on the job market, which can both reassure anxious history majors and bring more students into our courses. I would especially recommend this if you’re teaching core or introductory courses that have large numbers of non-majors and students who are still deciding on their academic path.


How do you like to teach foundational skills in history? Did you have a teacher at some point who helped you to build your own skills? Feel free to share in the comments!

How I Write

Photo credit: Mike Tinnion

I love to write, and over the years I think I’ve gotten pretty good at writing a lot. That wasn’t always the case, but over the time I found an approach to writing that works well for me. In this post I’m going to share some insight into my writing process. Maybe that process will work well for you too, and maybe it won’t. I hope that at least it will help you to think about your own approach to writing—whether you’re a student, a scholar, or just someone who loves to put pen to page or fingertips to keyboard—so that you can make the most of your craft as a writer.

Distraction-Free Time

The first, and most important thing, is setting aside or carving out time to write, free of distractions. This looks different for everyone, because we all have different obligations that pull at our time, and we might feel more or less focused at different times of day. I tend to be a night owl, but I like to write soon after I get up in the morning, when my mind feels fresh and I can drink a cup of coffee while I get some words down. I also try to get as much writing done as possible before picking up my phone, or checking my email or social media. These things end up feeling like distractions when all I want to do is focus on the piece at hand. I also almost always write with earplugs in—and sometimes noise-canceling headphones on top of them—to shut out any distracting noise.

This—that writing requires distraction-free time—was a hard lesson, and it took a while for me to learn! When I was in high school and college, I used to put my papers off until the last minute, in part because I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I had this idea that writing was an act of genius, and that I had to wait until I was struck by a good idea in order to get started. What I learned later is that writing is a way of thinking, and it’s often while writing that I figure out what my argument is, or get some new insight into whatever it is I’m writing about.

So writing is work that takes time, but not just any time—focused time. When I was an undergraduate I would often go to the library’s computer lab to write. I secretly hoped to run into a friend to chat up, to distract me from whatever work I was supposed to be doing. But even if I didn’t know anyone in the computer lab, I could always—and did always—turn to AOL Instant Messenger (dating myself, I know) to take my mind off work. The result was that I spent much more time “writing” than I needed to, lost out on a ton of sleep, and wrote papers that should have been a lot better than they were.

Starting Longhand

Almost anything I write, whether it’s an op-ed, a journal article, or part of a book, starts on paper. Especially when I’m just getting started on a piece of writing, typing feels excruciating, and the temptation to constantly delete and rewrite is just too great. But when I’m writing longhand, usually with a gel rollerball pen (right now I love the Uniball Signo 207 Ultra Micro) on a legal pad, I’m much more able to get into something like a flow state. And since I’m not writing on a screen, there’s much less temptation to click over into another app or to look up some detail that I’m unsure about. As such, my handwritten drafts are full of question marks, inexact dates (“in 19XX”), and placeholders (“[insert quote here]”).

My next step is to type up whatever I’ve written longhand into Scrivener, which is my preferred word processor. I’ll often take a first pass at editing while I type, tweaking my prose, adding new ideas as they come, and filling in details that I can easily check online. After typing up my longhand section, I’ll either go back and write something else out longhand, or move on to editing and revising. For me, this is a matter of feeling. If I feel like I have more ideas that I need to get out, I’ll go back to writing longhand. If not, I’ll move on, even if I know that I’ll still have to come back and draft more new material later.

Editing and Revising

Once I feel like I’m at a place where it makes sense to revise what I’ve drafted and then typed up, I’ll take what I have, print it out, and mark it up. I like to use something that stands out on the page—either pencil or colored ink pen—because it makes it easier to see my corrections and notations later on.

At this stage I might be doing one or more things at once: reverse outlining to understand what order my ideas should go in, drafting new prose right there on the page, and/or line editing what I already have to make it more polished and precise. This is an iterative process, so I’ll usually go through a couple rounds of revisions—moving pieces of a draft around, adding sections, and tweaking language—before I’m happy with what I have. Sometimes key points—even my overall argument—will change during this process, and that’s okay. Again writing is a way of thinking, and revising is a critical phase of the process of writing.


And that, in a nutshell, is it. If you’re not sure what approach to writing works best for use some trial and error to figure it out. Try writing at different times of day, different strategies for cutting out distraction, and with different writing platforms. And if you like, feel free to share your approach to writing in the comments.

Some Notes:

  • My approach to distraction-free work comes in part from reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. I highly recommend it if you want to learn how to do meaningful work amidst a lot of distraction.
  • I like Scrivener because it makes it easy to chop up a draft and rearrange or combine chunks of a larger piece. This works well for me, since I almost never sit down and write something from start to finish.
  • Some writers like to start their day with morning pages. I haven’t found that it works especially well for me, but maybe it works for you!
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