Co-writing: Part 1

One of the best learning experiences you can have as an academic is to write together with others. This is a good way of getting a concrete insight into how you may work and write in ways other than yours. I started co-writing in earnest in the spring of 2016. That semester, I was working on three simultaneous projects with three different colleagues: Isak Hammar, Anna Kaijser and Johan Östling. These projects came to cross-fertilize each other and ended up being a crash course for me on researching and writing together. In a three-part series of blog posts, I will thus discuss these collaborations and what I learned from them.

The first project was carried out together with Isak. We knew each other very well. Between 2008 and 2013, we were both PhD students. We took the same courses and shared offices. We then taught together and were even on parental leave at the same time. Our basic views of historical scholarship and our attitude toward the academy were similar, even though our empirical research interests differed.

Isak wrote his thesis on antiquity, while I focused on the period from 1600 up until the present. After receiving his PhD, Isak became interested in classical reception studies (i.e., how people have used and related to classical antiquity throughout history). I, on the other hand, studied the breakthrough of environmental issues in Sweden in the 1960s. There were no obvious shared interests between us. Sometimes, however, you discover unexpected things.

One of the actors I was interested in was diplomat Rolf Edberg, who published his environmental classic Spillran av ett moln back in 1966. This book is characterized by an ecologically holistic perspective that was uncommon at this time. When reading the book, I noticed that Edberg drew a significant number of parallels between the environmental crisis of his time and the fall of the classical civilizations. I pointed this out to Isak and had him read a few selected passages. After that, our project was up and running.

The first step in the writing process was to prepare a brief application for research funding. In relation to this, we acquainted ourselves with international journals focusing on so-called classical reception studies. Many of these were to a great extent characterized by literary studies, but in one of them – International Journal of the Classical Tradition – we found a couple of articles we could somewhat relate to. We wrote in the application that we were going to submit an article to this journal. After having waited for six months, we received a positive reply from the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation.

But the step from writing applications to focused research time was steep. It took almost a year before we could both free up enough time. During this period, we both did totally different things. I remember that in the late fall, we started to worry about whether we could get something done. Did we really have enough material? Would any of the journals be interested?

Nevertheless, we finally decided to schedule a few weeks where we could fully focus on the project. We returned to our application and re-read Edberg’s book. Somewhere around this time, we realized that we had somehow already made quite a bit of progress. The application felt like a manual. We just had to do the things we had included there.

We brought different skillsets to the project. Isak wrote fluently in English, thus significantly improving the quality of the language used in my drafts. Obviously, he also wrote the section on classical reception. He also arranged for his American colleague Dustin W. Dixon to help us with a critical reading before we submitted the article. As far as I was concerned, I had experiences from peer-review processes and could easily place Rolf Edberg’s book in an environmental history context.

We arrived jointly at the structure of the article. We had meetings where we discussed what to write, which were then followed up by individual writing. We divided our empirical ideas between us. One thing I noticed during this process was that Isak – unlike me – wrote more organically. He could not say in advance exactly what he would arrive at. This was something he discovered during the actual writing. I, on the other hand, had clearer ideas in advance and my writing was not as creative. It was very informative to see these differences appear when working on the same material!

Our manuscript was completed during the spring, after which the review process followed. Here, being two authors was definitely advantageous. The comments we received proposed quite substantial changes. Among other things, a specific empirical section (which I had written) did not appeal to the reviewers at all. But the very fact that we were two authors made it easier not to take this personally. We discussed the comments, formulated a plan for how to respond and which changes to make. This included aspects such as entirely getting rid of the above-mentioned empirical section.

Our revised version was accepted, and in the summer of 2017, the article “A Classical Tragedy in the Making: Rolf Edberg’s Use of Antiquity and the Emergence of Environmentalism in Scandinavia” was published. Whether it has made any impact on the international scholarly community is unclear, but we were probably onto something. The fact is that when Gustaf Johansson presented his thesis in Uppsala in 2018, he showed with even greater clarity that many people in the 1970s made sense of the environmental crisis by turning to classical antiquity.

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