Conveying their expertise to a general audience expands the reach of faculty members’ academic work.
With a few hours of writing, faculty members from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, find they can expand their reach among academic circles and to a wider audience across the globe.
For three consecutive years UT has placed first in the SEC among scholars writing for the nonprofit news organization The Conversation, and members of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) play a significant role in that.
Among the 13 articles from UT published on The Conversation in the first quarter of 2026, 11 were written by CAS scholars. Some were republished in newspapers across nearly half of the United States. Fast Company republished articles on artificial intelligence, data centers, and George Washington. Others were picked up by specialized sites including Space.com, Science Alert, Phys.org, and Religion News Service. The articles do more than showcase the expertise and value of the work being done by UT faculty; they also can lead to further opportunities.
For faculty members, the amount of writing and editing time required varies, but many estimate it takes perhaps eight to 12 hours total over the course of a few weeks to a few months. The process becomes faster as they learn how to work with the editors of The Conversation to craft an article that will appeal to a general audience.
“It’s a refreshing experience to go through the writing and editing phases so quickly,” said Associate Professor Mary Dzon in the Department of English. She was able to draw on research from her first book in writing a December 2025 article about depictions of Jesus’s early life. The Conversation translated the article into French and Indonesian, and it has more than 327,000 online reads across at least 10 countries. More than 19 media outlets republished the work.
“It’s enjoyable to get away from all the footnotes and stiff prose I am used to in academic writing and to try reaching out to wider audiences,” Dzon said. “Time-wise, it’s a bit of a sacrifice, but it isn’t a long-drawn-out process.” The work also connected her with more public humanities scholars in medieval studies, who similarly believe in the relevance of the medieval to the modern.
The first step may be responding to a request from the UT Office of Communications and Marketing (OCM) when The Conversation is seeking an expert to write about a topic. However, OCM also will work with faculty members who want to submit their own pitch for an article.
Pitches are no more than 200 words, including a headline, a description of the main point of the article and why it would interest a general audience, and an explanation of why the person is an expert on the topic, such as links to peer-reviewed research.
The completed articles are typically 800 to 1,000 words. Once posted on The Conversation they can be republished across multiple channels under a Creative Commons license, which bars others from changing the text.
Timely Topics
“Reaching a wider, non-academic audience is important in our current moment when many important issues need scholarly expertise that is clear and accessible,” said Robert D. Bland, an assistant professor of history and Africana studies.
He successfully pitched an article to The Conversation on a landmark Voting Rights Act case then pending before the US Supreme Court. Bland’s scholarship on racial gerrymandering provided perspective on the case of Louisiana v. Callais, and the article was tied to the publication of his first book, Requiem for Reconstruction.
The article was first posted online in February, and the editors worked with him to post an update the morning after the court’s decision. His piece was republished in newspapers across nearly 20 states and by a Florida public radio station. “A member of the local news reached out to me for comment after the Callais decision and the state legislature began the effort to redraw the state’s congressional map,” Bland said.
Encouraging Curious Kids
Professor Brandon Prins, head of the Department of Political Science, has written about topics such as Russian diplomacy for The Conversation. He also took the time to write a piece for its Curious Kids section, answering a question from an 11-year-old, “Who was the first pirate?” That became one of the most-read pieces among 54 articles by UT scholars on the site in 2025, and it is now approaching 100,000 online views.
“The topic was in my wheelhouse, and I see benefits to engaging in some public-facing scholarship,” said Prins, who wrote about global sea piracy for The Conversation during the pandemic.
Publishers of material for young children in the US and China picked up the Curious Kids post, and it also led to Prins being interviewed on the topic of piracy in Latin America.
While he had to do a bit of background research for the Curious Kids piece, Prins said it took about the same amount of time as his other articles on The Conversation. “I find the process of translating theoretical and empirical work for a more general audience both enjoyable and interesting. Plus, I am always surprised by how many people read it and reach out,” he said.
Collaborating with Co-Authors
Scholars don’t have to do all the writing themselves. They can co-author an article with research partners or graduate students.
Anthropology Professor Alex Bentley has written for The Conversation alone and as co-author. “When co-authoring, it’s been easiest for me to let the lead author write the first draft,” he said. “The Conversation piece needs to have a compelling flow and an engaging idea behind it, and so the first draft is best written by one person, with co-authors then editing and adding details, figures, and so on.“
Chancellor’s Professor Derek Alderman in the Department of Geography and Sustainability has partnered with scholars at UT and other universities, and worked with graduate students on pieces for The Conversation. While the writing requires a bit of extra time for the students, they also gain writing skills and evidence that they can communicate in clear, compelling ways, he noted.
Furthering Research
“Describing your academic research in plain language is a challenging experience that definitely makes your research better, because you really have to think through ‘What did we discover? Why does that matter?’ and The Conversation writers will challenge you to do this,” Bentley said. “They are excellent writers with a sense for what message will appeal to a wide readership.”
In addition, Alderman said, the process can help scholars identify new dimensions for further scholarship. “In that respect, writing for The Conversation is a form of scholarship in its own right and can be part of the critical process of generating new lines of traditional research as part of the two-way collaboration between public and scholar that is the backbone of the modern land-grant university,” he said.
“A large part of the inspiration behind our long-term project on the ‘Living Black Atlas’ (a full-fledged academic and education initiative) came out of a Conversation piece that Josh (Inwood from Pennsylvania State University) and I wrote back in 2021 on activist Black counter-mapping,” Alderman said. The piece has been read more than 300,000 times online. “Public response cemented in our minds that the topic had more than merely dry academic implications,” he said.
Even when responding to a call to write about a topic from The Conversation requires a bit of extra research, faculty members find value in the experience.
“It has been helpful in forcing me to rethink my writing style, like how I phrase things,” said Megan Bryson, a Lindsay Young Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. “Those can be really good skills to have if I want to write a more public-facing book aiming for a broader readership than just in my academic field.”
Learn more about The Conversation and how OCM works with faculty members. CAS faculty members should contact Amanda Womac, the college’s director of communications, if they are interested in learning more about writing for The Conversation or other media training.
by Amy Beth Miller