From Studying the Past to Shaping Its Future

How History Led Me to Publishing

For much of my undergraduate degree, I imagined that studying history only led down a relatively narrow set of paths. The usual answers, such as teaching, law, academia, and museums, circulated constantly in classrooms and on career panels. Publishing, if it was mentioned at all, was treated as peripheral or inaccessible, something done to historians rather than by them. It wasn’t until my third year, second semester of university, that I seriously considered publishing as a career, and even then, it emerged not from a career fair or résumé workshop, but from a history classroom.

In the fall semester of my third year, I enrolled in a women’s history course titled Women, War, and Nation, taught by one of the most influential professors of my undergraduate experience. I adored the course for many reasons: the content was intellectually challenging, the theoretical frameworks pushed me to think more critically about my own position in the world, and the readings foregrounded voices that are often marginalized in traditional historical narratives. But more than anything else, I loved the stories—the deeply human accounts of people navigating extraordinary circumstances.

The course took a transnational approach, moving beyond a narrow Western focus to examine women’s experiences across different geopolitical and cultural contexts. We learned about women involved in anti-colonial movements, wartime resistance, and nation-building efforts across Angola, China, and Guatemala. What struck me most was not only the breadth of these stories but the care with which they were contextualized and interpreted. These were not heroic myths or simplified case studies; they were complex narratives shaped by emotion, contingency, and contradiction. Coming from survey courses that often privileged chronology and coverage, this class felt like an invitation to slow down and listen. At the time, I thought this was simply what it meant to be in a good history course. I did not yet realize that what I was responding to was indeed clarity of argument, thoughtful structure, and a careful curation of voices—a few keystones that are also the hallmarks of good publishing.

Midway through the semester, I was invited to participate in Footnotes, the University of Guelph’s undergraduate academic journal on gender, sexuality, and social change. Footnotes is entirely student-run, and each year a small collective of undergraduate editors is tasked with producing a full academic journal from start to finish in just four and a half months. Saying yes felt instinctive: I loved the subject matter, I trusted the professor who encouraged me to join, and I was curious about what “working on a journal” actually meant.

What I didn’t expect was how transformative the experience would be.

As editors, our responsibilities extended far beyond reading essays. We solicited submissions, communicated with authors, coordinated peer review, copyedited accepted pieces, worked on layout and formatting, liaised with printers, managed finances, ran social media, and ultimately organized and hosted a launch party for the finished issue. Each of us had a specific role—social media editor, finance editor, administrative editor, and executive editor—but the process was deeply collaborative. Decisions were made collectively, problems were solved together, and success depended on trusting each other to meet our self-assigned deadlines.

Naturally, I gravitated towards leadership. I have always been someone who feels most at ease when helping guide a group toward a shared goal. I still remember my high school history teacher telling me that I was an “unstoppable force” as I spearheaded group projects whenever possible (if only she could see me now, with a graduate degree in history!). More recently, a University of Guelph librarian remarked that I had “the eyes of a leader,” a comment that stuck with me precisely because it was unexpected, but more so because she knew nothing about me yet immediately saw something in me that was essential to my being. Somehow, the group of students I was paired with for Footnotes saw the same potential, and I was entrusted with a leadership role within the editorial collective.

What made the experience especially meaningful was not authority for its own sake, but the shared commitment to publishing the strongest Footnotes issue yet. We believed deeply in the importance of undergraduate research, particularly research that engaged critically with gender, sexuality, and social justice. Our authors and artists were students grappling seriously with theory, archives, and lived experience, and we felt a responsibility to honour that work through careful editing and thoughtful presentation.

At first, I enjoyed the process simply because it was new. History courses typically follow a familiar rhythm: readings, a midterm, an essay, and a final exam. While I valued that structure, the Footnotes experiential learning course offered something entirely different. It asked me to use parts of my brain that history courses rarely activate—creativity, project management, visual thinking, and long-term planning. And yes, I received academic credit for it, which felt almost too good to be true.

Only later did I realize how directly this experience shaped and mirrored the work I now do as an Editorial Assistant for the Social Sciences Acquisitions team at the University of Toronto Press. At the time, Footnotes felt like an exciting extracurricular extension of my studies; in retrospect, it was a form of professional training that built naturally on the skills I had already developed as a history student.

Studying history prepares you for publishing in ways that are often invisible while you are still in the classroom. Historians are trained to evaluate sources critically, assess the strength of an argument, situate a piece of writing within a broader scholarly conversation, and ask not only what is being said but why it matters and to whom. These are precisely the questions that sit at the heart of acquisitions and editorial work. When reviewing submissions, whether journal articles, book proposals, or full manuscripts, the task is not unlike assessing a historiographical intervention. Does this work fill a gap? Does it speak to existing scholarship while advancing the conversation? Is the evidence sound, the methodology clear, and the intervention legible to its intended audience?

For history students in particular, publishing can feel opaque because we are rarely taught how knowledge moves beyond the seminar room. We submit essays, receive grades, and move on, often without thinking about the infrastructures that support academic knowledge production.

Who decides which books get published? How do journals shape scholarly debates? What happens to a manuscript after peer review? My experience—first with Footnotes and later at University of Toronto Press—pulled back the curtain on these processes. It revealed publishing as a field deeply intertwined with values that historians already hold: intellectual rigour, ethical responsibility, accessibility, and a care for storytelling that I discovered in my third-year Women, War, and Nation class.

Although I now work on the Social Sciences Acquisitions team rather than directly within the Humanities team, I have never felt distanced from what originally drew me to history as an undergraduate and graduate student. At its core, my motivation for studying history was never confined to a single discipline or time period. It was driven by a desire to seek knowledge in all its forms: to understand how people make meaning, how societies organize themselves, and how ideas circulate and change. Working in publishing allows me to continue to engage with these questions, albeit through a different lens. The manuscripts I encounter grapple with power, identity, institutions, and lived experience, many of the same themes that animate historical inquiry and guided my classrooms and seminars.

In this way, publishing has allowed me to remain deeply connected to academia without being bound to one disciplinary label. It satisfies both my intellectual curiosity and my desire to contribute to the production and dissemination of knowledge. I am still reading critically, thinking structurally, and engaging with complex arguments; I am simply doing so from the other side of the page.

If I could offer one piece of advice to history students, it would be this: pay close attention to the aspects of your coursework that energize you, even if they fall outside what you initially imagined your career would look like. For me, that meant editing, collaboration, and curation—the moments when I helped shape ideas rather than produce them alone. For others, it may be public history, digital humanities, or archival work. 

Looking back, it now seems almost inevitable that I would find my way into publishing, though it felt unexpected at the time. My love of stories, my fascination with how knowledge is shaped and shared, and my instinct to work collectively toward meaningful intellectual goals all found a home at the University of Toronto Press. Publishing has allowed me to stay intellectually engaged while also embracing practical, creative, and collaborative labour—work that is often invisible, but essential to the life of scholarship.

For students studying history and wondering what comes next, I want to emphasize that the field equips you with far more than content knowledge. It trains you to read closely, think critically, write clearly, and approach ideas with care and responsibility. Publishing is one path, an exciting, challenging, and deeply rewarding one, where those skills are not only relevant but essential.