Reflecting on publishing and research culture – with Professor Rachel E. Johnson

At the University of London Press, we have been reflecting on recent conversations in the sector about research culture, what this means for the humanities, the potential benefits of open access, the role of publishing and our own role as a publisher. 

In this new series of blog posts, recent UoL Press authors share their own publishing experiences and words of advice and support for new authors, along with their views on open access and what more publishers can do to work with the research community to help build supportive, collaborative and open research and publishing cultures. 

In our next post in the series, we talk to Rachel E. Johnson, author of Voice, Silence and Gender in South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle (publishing in March 2025). Rachel E. Johnson is a historian of South Africa with interests in gender and politics. She is Assistant Professor in Modern African History at Durham University, UK. 

1. Tell us about your book with UoL Press.

Voice, Silence and Gender is focused on the final three decades of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and traces the appearance and disappearance of one young woman activist within the archives of that time. I write what I call a ‘shadow’ biography of this one young woman, Masabata Loate. This is a biography that maintains the silences in Loate’s story – to try to understand what these silences tell us in and of themselves. Masabata Loate is not a well-known name within South African history. In the ten years between 1976 and 1986 she appears at different moments as a school student activist, a beauty queen, a terrorism suspect, a political prisoner and eventually a murder victim. After 1986 different stories of her death, at the height of the violence in Soweto during the township Uprisings, have continued to circulate. I argue that the fragmented nature of our knowledge about Loate’s life and eventual death in the struggle is emblematic of the processes by which gendered narratives of the past have been made. I draw attention to the dynamics of speech and silence within the struggle itself, as it was unfolding, and ask how this continues to shape what we know about the past. So, the book is very much about the recent past in South Africa, but it also tries to offer methodologies for historians of other times and places who are grappling with the ways in which voices and silences are made and unmade. 

2. What advice do you have for authors looking to publish their first book? 

If you can, then take your time. Both to find the right publisher, who is going to support you in developing your manuscript, and to be sure of what it is you want to say in your book and to whom. My discipline (history) places great emphasis on monographs, and there is a lot of pressure on young academics to turn their thesis into a book. It took me a long time to find the desire to write the book, independently of that pressure to publish. Then, it also took me a long time to find the right publisher. Once I did, it helped enormously in refining my initial manuscript. 

3. What do you think the benefits of publishing your book open access are or will be? 

One of the things I am interested in as a historian, is how and where stories are told, and by whom. So, I was always keen for the book to be open access. It opens possibilities for being part of a much wider conversation with more people. I am hopeful that the book will be read by more people and by a wider range of people than can afford the typical cost of an academic book. Of course, you still need internet access and speed, and a device to download and read it. This is not a resource that is evenly available to people around the world – but open access at least removes the upfront cost of the book itself. I hope that this will widen the book’s accessibility in South Africa especially.  

4. Has anything about the process of publishing your book open access been a surprise in any way? 

One of the things I have found most interesting about the process, is thinking about how readers encounter open access e-books and that this might need to shape the way the book is written. I was given the advice that most readers download chapters and so individual chapters should be able to stand alone as pieces of writing. I think this makes perfect sense and in reality, readers of academic books have perhaps often (always?) read this way. The fact that online downloads are trackable just makes this visible. I took this as a challenge – to write chapters that would be compelling and comprehensible in isolation, whilst trying also to maintain a sense of the book as a whole entity in which a longer form argument unfolds. My aim was to make readers want to read the other chapters even if it wasn’t necessary for them to do so to grasp my arguments. I found it very helpful to think about my audience in this way and I think it has made the book stronger. 

5. Why did you choose the University of London Press as your publisher? 

Alongside the knowledge that the final book would be open access, the fact that the New Historical Perspectives series was for first books, really made it an attractive option for me. The commitment of the series editors in helping develop the manuscript has been so valuable, and the author workshop with an expert in my field was a fantastic opportunity. I found the author workshop where I met face-to-face with those who had read the manuscript so much more constructive than the standard peer-review model in which you receive anonymous comments without that opportunity for dialogue. For me, this is an example of positive research and publishing culture in action.