HSS Humanities Center Book Institute

The Book Institute's forerunner, the Second Book Institute, convened in June 2023 and 2024. Fellows developed concrete plans for completing their second books and networked with publishers from scholarly presses.

Photo Credit: Benjamin Kahan

Making the transition from a dissertation to a first book and from a first to a second book can be challenging. HSS Humanities Center's Book Institute (formerly the Second Book Institute) is here to help you overcome writing obstacles, finish your manuscript, and navigate book publication.

The Book Institute assists faculty in monograph-based disciplines at every stage of the writing process, from formulating and completing the manuscript to publishing the book. Fellows at the Book Institute receive detailed feedback on their work in progress, peer mentorship, and guidance from editors at university presses.

The HSS Humanities Center's Book Institute facilitates the promotion of Assistant Professors to Associate and of Associate Professors to Full. We welcome all tenured and tenure-track faculty to apply for the limited spaces available each year at the Institute: however, we give preference to Associate Professors and Advanced Assistant Professors nearing promotion. Attending the Institute means committing to reading and commenting on the work of other Fellows.

The third Book Institute at LSU convened from Monday, June 2, to Friday, June 6 2025. The BI co-directors led brainstorming sessions, manuscript workshops, and a publishers' roundtable to guide six faculty Fellows from different departments across HSS in developing concrete plans for completing their books. Our Fellows also networked individually with publishers Fordham and LSU Press.

Feel free to reach out to the Institute's co-directors, Benjamin Kahan (bkahan@lsu.edu) and Pallavi Rastogi (prastogi@lsu.edu) if you are interested in becoming a Fellow or have any questions.

HSS Humanities Center Book Institute Directors

Benjamin Kahan (Co-Director)

Benjamin Kahan is the Herbert Huey McElveen Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and a number of other institutions. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019). His new monograph Sexual Aim and Its Misses is under contract with Chicago. He is also the editor of The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature (2024).

Headshot of Pallavi Rastogi

Pallavi Rastogi (Co-Director)

Dr. Pallavi Rastogi is the J.F. Taylor Endowed Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her first book, Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa, was published by Ohio State University in 2008. Dr. Rastogi’s second book, Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. Her co-edited collection of essays, entitled Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature, published by the Modern Languages Association (MLA) appeared in print in March 2024. She has also written widely on South African, South Asian, and South Asian diasporic literature as well as multiethnic British and American literature in various journals and anthologies. She serves as Associate Editor for The South Asian Review and is currently working on a book on minority non-South Asian representations of the Indian subcontinent and an edited collection on Asians in Louisiana under advance contract with LSU Press.