Historical Scholarship, Periodization, Themes, and Specialization: Implications for Research and Publication

Abstract

Within the scholarly communication system, historical scholarship represents a burgeoning and evolving intellectual topography. This discussion attempts to frame historical research and scholarship within a contextual disciplinary environment where specialization and the use of historical periodization and discrete themes reflect necessary conditions of historical research and scholarship. Normative practice and conditions animating the academic historical enterprise generate and maintain the drive to specialization appearing in various publication venues. Historians necessarily hone specific periods, themes, or orientations, addressing historiographic conditions that lie at the centre of historical research and scholarship. The drive toward highly articulated monographs, journals, and reference publications speaks to this particular phenomenon in historical research and scholarship. The logic animating graduate history education and training and the momentum toward specialization, as well as hyper-specialization, exert influence, if not pressure, upon the scholarly publication system. Historians concentrating on highly honed and articulated research endeavour to disseminate their scholarship in venues that address their intellectual and historiographic orientations and preoccupations. The disciplinary and intellectual morphology of historical research and scholarly publication cannot be adequately appreciated without considering these phenomena.