Dr. Kevin Lerner Spends Sabbatical Writing New Book

Source: Unsplash, Jan Kahánek. https://unsplash.com/photos/fVUl6kzIvLg

Sabbatical was long overdue for Dr. Kevin Lerner; after applying over two years ago, he finally got to enjoy his time away from campus during this semester and begin work on his second book. Upon his return in the fall, he will resume his normal teaching schedule as well as succeeding Joanna D’Avanzo as chair of Marist’s communication department. 

This has been Lerner’s first semester away from teaching since his academic career began in 2003. Despite enjoying his time away, it came as quite the shock to his long-established routine. 

“My life has been dictated by the rhythms of the semesters,” Lerner said. “It’s already a loose job being a professor but I’ve lost that anchoring of coming to campus four days a week and teaching.”

He began his sabbatical planning to follow a carefully planned schedule for himself, with the hopes of maximizing productivity while mimicking his usual life as a professor. He also allotted time for self-care elements like reading and exercise. But, this approach did not fit his style of work, and the schedule was abandoned very early on. 

Lerner also had certain personal goals at the start of his sabbatical, including improving his guitar playing and learning Chinese, but these are both yet to be accomplished. 

“I’m about as good at both of those things as I was three months ago,” said Lerner. 

Despite not following a strict schedule, Lerner noted the importance of determination when seeking to complete a project on his own time.

“You have to be really self-driven to get anything done,” said Lerner. “There tend to be long periods where I look like I’m not working followed by intense periods of typing. That’s how I’ve operated since I wrote my very first high school paper.”

The upcoming book will be the second that Lerner has written. It is set to be a biography on three famous journalists, Jay Anthony Lukas, David Halbertsam, and Gaetano “Gay” Talese. The book will consist of both archival research as well as interviews with Talese and others connected to the journalists. 

Lerner’s first book, “Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism”, was published in 2019 through the University of Missouri Press. The book was derived from his doctoral thesis and took nearly a decade to be published. 

For the upcoming book, though, Lerner is taking a different approach. He is seeking a partnership with a traditional publisher, as opposed to an academic press, in order to make it accessible to a wider audience of readers. 

“There should be a good bit of built-in interest among the reading public to want to read about their lives and what this book has to say about them,” said Dr. Lerner. “I figured this would be a good way to bridge that divide between scholarly research and something that people will actually read.”

So far, Lerner has completed the full book proposal and has begun work on outlining the opening chapters. He predicts that the book will be completed in its entirety and published by 2024; he will continue teaching throughout the remainder of the writing process.

Along with working on the book, Lerner is set to travel to both Chile and Italy this summer for a conference and to visit Marist’s Florence campus, respectively. 

On July 1, Lerner will assume the role of chair of the communication department at Marist, following the completion of Joanna D’Avanzo’s term. The position will be very different from what Lerner is used to as a professor, and will add a wide array of responsibilities to his docket. 

“It’s kind of a thankless job and the things that you take on are not necessarily the things you become a professor to do,” said Lerner. “It’s much more like running a business than being a professor.” 

As chair, Lerner will be in charge of creating schedules as well as working on creating a new curriculum for the communications department, among other things. In order to make room for his new responsibilities and the continuing work on his book, he is likely to be granted multiple course releases and may not teach his usual introduction to journalism and capping courses. He will resume teaching mass communication law and readings in journalism this coming fall. 

Returning to campus in the fall will certainly be an adjustment for Lerner, who is yet to teach a mask-free class since the onset of the pandemic. However, he is eager to return to the classroom and reconnect with his students at Marist.

“It will be a little more sudden for me to be back in a maskless classroom since I missed the sort of transition semester,” said Lerner. “But, I miss talking to students. I love students.”