Ashwini Tambe on Editorial Mentoring

Ashwini Tambe is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University and the former editorial director, from 2011 until 2024, of the interdisciplinary journal Feminist Studies. There’s a key bit of back story to this episode. On two unrelated occasions in my career, authors from very different disciplines each sent me a quite remarkable document that they had received in response to a submission to Feminist Studies. These were letters, written by Ashwini on behalf of the journal, that generously and generatively summed up and responded to reader reports. In these letters, she laid out the readers’ key points, described the strengths and weaknesses of the essay as she and her colleagues saw them, and offered a series of thoughtful suggestions for what the author could do. In each case that I saw, it was great advice, and it was delivered in a notably careful and caring manner. So I wanted to talk to Ashwini about how and why she wrote those documents, and about the role they played in the journal’s broader approach to mentoring.

Mentioned:

Aatish Taseer, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile.