Publication Date
A revised version of my doctoral dissertation is being published by Brill at the end of May. You can find the webpage for the publication here: https://brill.com/display/title/68202.
I defended my dissertation (and graduated from the PhD — happens on the same day in the Dutch system) on the 20th of May, 2021. The book is coming out four years and nine days later. I couldn’t tell you why it has taken, or will have taken, so long. I contacted publishers in 2021 and the dissertation was already very book-shaped when I submitted it. It shouldn’t have required much work. It will have taken far longer to get the book published than it did to write it. But here we are. It will be a relief when it’s out.
I won’t be making any money from the publication, either. My PhD wasn’t funded — my own department at Leiden decided I shouldn’t receive the money I’d qualified for — so I wasted money on the project and should never have undertaken it. The pandemic caused me to lose a lot of my freelancing income. The opportunity costs were extreme. I’d need to make around €100,000 or so from the book to actually earn anything from it; suffice it to say that in the best case scenario my profits will be a few orders of magnitude less than that. It’s been a disappointing process (I mean: the doctorate, the publication, everything) and my life won’t be enormously improved by the book’s release.
I haven’t been impressed by Brill, to put it mildly, but I wasn’t impressed by any of the other publishers I spoke to or tried to work with, either. One editor at a university press told me, after I’d submitted a revised version of the text with the emendations they’d requested, that they’d get back in touch with me in ‘a couple of weeks’ — and then didn’t respond when I sent them an email four months later. And then got annoyed when I said I’d submitted the book elsewhere six weeks after that.
As I say: I will be relieved, rather than happy, when the thing finally comes out.
The book/dissertation is an edition, English translation, and detailed study of Bujangga Manik, a fifteenth-century narrative poem in Old Sundanese about a young nobleman who, disappointed with human society, travels across Java and Bali hoping to find a decent piece of ground on which to die. I find the character and his motivations remarkably relatable. I believe the poem is worth reading even if you’re not that interested in Southeast Asia, and I found it genuinely pleasurable to read, translate, and comment on the text. It’s a shame that everything around that process has been so unpleasant. I suppose it’s in keeping with the subject matter.
Anyway: I will also be at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in July. I’m just doing a little roundtable thing about the meaning of the ‘Middle Ages’. I’ll be there em carne e osso. It’ll be nice to visit Yorkshire again — I haven’t been in well over a decade — and I’m sure it’ll be nice, too, to meet up with some of the people who have read and supported this blog and me in various ways. So do get in touch if you’d like to meet up for a drink or something like that. (I no longer drink alcohol but I don’t mind hanging out in the pub.) My usual email address is al.west87 at gmail .com.
I have some other projects going on at the moment, which I’m not going to tell you about, and I’m going to Japan on holiday in a few weeks. I have no other news to report.
Alex West — Lisbon, 2025.
