Nicholous M. Deal – författare

This book reimagines what it means to begin an academic life by exploring the diverse, nonlinear, and often invisible paths that lead people into academic careers. Through essays blending critique and celebration, it gives voice to those who balance doctoral work with caregiving, activism, migration, and marginalization. The book challenges the myth of the “ideal academic” and expands the meaning of success in higher education.

Readers will gain both insight and affirmation from this collection. The essays deliver practical wisdom and emotional resonance by weaving autoethnography, poetic inquiry, and narrative reflection into acts of resistance and renewal. The book’s approach is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from feminist, postcolonial, and organizational theory, to reveal how structural inequities shape who gets to belong in academia. By modelling reflective, creative, and plurality of writing, it offers readers ways for reimagining mentorship, scholarly identity, and the rhythms of academic life itself.

Starting Academia Differently is written for early career researchers, doctoral students, and academic leaders seeking to make universities more humane, inclusive, and imaginative. It will also resonate with educators, mentors, and practitioners in higher education who wish to support diverse trajectories and foster spaces where different kinds of scholarship, and scholars, can thrive.

This book reimagines what it means to begin an academic life by exploring the diverse, nonlinear, and often invisible paths that lead people into academic careers. Through essays blending critique and celebration, it gives voice to those who balance doctoral work with caregiving, activism, migration, and marginalization. The book challenges the myth of the “ideal academic” and expands the meaning of success in higher education.

Readers will gain both insight and affirmation from this collection. The essays deliver practical wisdom and emotional resonance by weaving autoethnography, poetic inquiry, and narrative reflection into acts of resistance and renewal. The book’s approach is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from feminist, postcolonial, and organizational theory, to reveal how structural inequities shape who gets to belong in academia. By modelling reflective, creative, and plurality of writing, it offers readers ways for reimagining mentorship, scholarly identity, and the rhythms of academic life itself.

Starting Academia Differently is written for early career researchers, doctoral students, and academic leaders seeking to make universities more humane, inclusive, and imaginative. It will also resonate with educators, mentors, and practitioners in higher education who wish to support diverse trajectories and foster spaces where different kinds of scholarship, and scholars, can thrive.

There has been a surge of ANTi-History research over the last 15 years. ANTi-History brings together the most impactful efforts to develop, apply and critique ANTi-History in one comprehensive book.

Deal, Hartt and Mills make sense of and organize the ongoing conversation around ANTi-History, using it as a lens to assess both the future and the potential of the budding field of historical organization studies and business history. They offer a systematic close reading of ANTi-History through its introduction to the field nearly two decades ago; the literatures that theorize it as an approach for ‘doing history’ and how others have contributed to its usefulness to scholars, practitioners, and students.

In addition, they offer an exploration of the empirical research areas, settings, and contexts – especially its position within an archival zeitgeist in critical management studies – that scholars have engaged in; and the international character that it has taken across numerous countries around the world.

ANTi-History revisits the debates that concern ANTi-History and its theorization of the past, identifying potential future research and unique opportunities to further advance and refine ANTi-History and critical historiography scholarship.