ABOUT CAROLE SARGENT
As an adult returning college student, my struggles and eventual academic success now form the most popular aspects of my seminars. I have a heart for anyone who feels like a late-blooming rose! Because of early hard knocks and a just-folks backstory, I relate to people facing all sorts of challenges including emerging scholars from under-served communities, two-city academic couples, parents of children with special needs, and scholars living with disability.
My authors learn to identify the spirit inside themselves that brought them to the pursuit of a doctorate in the first place. By understanding who they are and what their contributions are worth, they’ll leave my courses with a fresh perspective: that they and their ideas are precious and irreplaceable, and when framed properly, they are absolute gold to editors. In my seminars, scholars learn to see their work as part of a larger story: one that can only thrive with their input offered with assurance, clarity, and appreciation of well-shared conversation.
I joined Georgetown as a faculty member in the English Department in 1997, teaching 18th-century literature and writing books. In 2006 I created the Office of Scholarly Publications and became its founding director. To date over 4/5 of Georgetown’s tenure-line faculty have come here for conversation about publication. In June of 2022 I celebrated twenty-five years at Georgetown, and I remain a full-time employee.
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I founded Academic Authors as a 501c3 nonprofit to lead faculty members and other research scholars to understand how valuable your individual intellectual contributions actually are to scholarly publishing. Through a comfortingly clear process, I inspire scholars to move out of supplicant mode, and transition naturally into attitudes of peaceful strength and confidence. The result is a re-imagining of the faculty-publisher relationship that benefits everyone and results in more peer-reviewed journal articles and university press books accepted at the very highest level.
Faculty learn how essential their unique perspectives -- including gender, race, socio-economics, regionality, nationality, religion, and much more -- are in the publishing world. You'll learn to slip by obstacles as you discover your true intellectual communities, ones usually hiding just beyond that last un-knocked-upon door.
Media background: If you want your research featured in the media, I can teach you how to do it without losing your soul. My books have been featured on 60 Minutes, in The New York Times, National Public Radio, the BBC, CNN, in Politico, Time and The Boston Globe, and in many more national and global outlets, and I can help you do the same.
Learn how your interests might fit with this focus by reading more on this LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/publishingadvising/
From an Italian-American family* (dad was Italian, from Philadelphia, and mom was an Oklahoma cowgirl who had never even met anyone from Italy before), I am a first-generation college graduate, and author of three books, two from Farrar, Straus & Giroux (1996 and 2000). In 2022 I published an antinuclear activist book, Transform Now Plowshares: Megan Rice, Gregory Boertje-Obed, and Michael Walli, with Liturgical Press. Two co-edited books with Fr. Drew Christiansen SJ, A World Free From Nuclear Weapons: The Vatican Conference on Disarmament, and Forbidden: Receiving Pope Francis's Condemnation of Nuclear Weapons, both from Georgetown University Press, appeared in 2020 and 2023.
A faculty and author event held at The George Washington University's Gelman Library.
* Sargent is my mother's maiden name, and I took it legally for feminist and logistical reasons (Fungaroli was a challenge). When I told mom my intention, she cried because it made her happy! And hey, I didn't lose the Italian birthname... just moved it over a little to the middle spot. According to genealogists we are each both our father and our mother, so in the genealogical sense nothing changed at all.
Traveling in Spain and Italy with faculty from Jesuit colleges and universities. Photo in Rome on the roof of the Jesuit Curia, 2015.