Aaron Hyman on Peer Review

Aaron Hyman is Professor of Art History at the University of Basel. His first book was published by the Getty in 2021; his second is through peer review and under contract at the University of Chicago Press. He has published peer reviewed articles in all of art history’s major disciplinary journals, including twice in the Art Bulletin in just a 3-year span, as well as in specialist and interdisciplinary venues ranging from Print Quarterly to Representations. We talked about peer review from a variety of perspectives – why to pursue it in the first place, how to write toward it, and how to receive and respond to reports, as well as how to write reports oneself. And, because Aaron is on the editorial boards of 21: Inquiries into Art, History and the Visual, and of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, we talked about how journal editors read reports and make decisions about whether to publish. It’s a long conversation, but we cover a lot of ground around a topic at the center of most authors’ publishing lives, and we had a lot to chew on.

Mentioned:

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait.

Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography.

Sasha Rossman, "Board-er Games: Defining Seventeenth-Century France in Pierre Duval’s Cartographic “enjeux” (ca. 1660)."