Ready to Workshop Your Writing and Give It New Energy?
Hiie Saumaa, PhD
Description
Are you currently working on an academic article or a chapter of your dissertation? Is there a piece of writing that you have written a while ago and want to return to? Are you in a place in your writing process where you would benefit from other people’s feedback, energy, enthusiasm, questions, and ideas for possible directions?
In this seminar, we will focus on your writing. Each participant brings to the seminar a piece of academic writing that they would like to workshop. We will help you shape it and find new possibilities. We might question some of your choices and point to areas where we feel at a loss. We might give you feedback about your use of the voice, how you analyze your examples, how you word your argument, and where you grab our attention fully.
We will use a workshop format that is often practiced in American higher education. In each 3-hour session, we will workshop the papers of 2-3 participants whose work we will have read and commented on in advance of the meeting. Each participant will have his/her paper workshopped by the entire group and each participant will read everyone else’s writing.
In addition to helping you make new choices about your draft, this course hopes to help you with a range of other important skills. You will hone your skills in giving and receiving feedback, exposing your work to others, building confidence as a writer and speaker in the English language, and navigating a discussion-based seminar setting in American academe.
The course runs from June 28 to July 2, 2021, from 10h-13h at Columbia Global Centers | Paris, 4 rue de Chevreuse, Paris 75006.
Deadline Monday, June 21st, 2021
Requirements
Please have ready a piece of writing of 10-15 double-spaced pages that you would like to workshop in this course. This could be a section from an article draft or a dissertation chapter.
The application is open to graduate students in the humanities and social sciences.
To receive a certification of completion from the Alliance Program and Columbia University – and to ensure that the workshop is a success for everyone involved – each participant is expected to:
- attend at least 3 sessions out of 5;
- actively participate in class discussions and be an attentive member of the group;
- come to the sessions prepared to give feedback on the writings of the other participants;
- be responsible for monitoring the tone of their written and spoken feedback (we will talk about how to give feedback in class);
- in case of absence, make sure to provide written feedback to the participants whose writings were discussed in the session.
For course related questions, please contact Dr. Hiie Saumaa at [email protected].
Instructor Bio
Hiie Saumaa, PhD (Columbia University), is a writer, scholar, and educator. Originally from Estonia, she writes and publishes in the English language for academic and general audiences. Hiie writes about the creative process, dance, movement, health, and the imagination. Her academic articles and chapters have been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, The Journal for Dance, Movement & Spirituality, The Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Somatics Journal/Magazine, and The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies. She writes a regular column for the journal Alternative and Complementary Therapies and is completing a book manuscript on the creative process of the choreographer Jerome Robbins. In 2018-2019, she was an inaugural fellow at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris and an artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Hiie has taught writing at Columbia University, New York University, Paris College of Art, Emlyon Business School, and L’institut Mines-Télécom. In 2021, she taught an intensive writing seminar titled “Writing for a New Audience: Starting Your Life as a Writer in the English Language” through the Columbia-Alliance Program. As a certified instructor of mindful movement and dance practices, she views dance as an integral part of her creative process and teaches classes in unlocking creativity through movement, intuition, physical awareness, and writing.