What We Offer
Field Studio helps academics at every career stage write books that stand out – books that make a genuine scholarly contribution and are recognised for it, through prizes, readership, and reach. Our workshops bring intensive, MFA-level creative writing instruction into an academic context, working alongside – not against – the rigour and goals of disciplinary training.
Our Track Record
Since 2022, Field Studio has worked with faculty and graduate students at leading anthropology departments, including Columbia, the University of Michigan, the University of Edinburgh, Oxford, and the Geneva Graduate Institute. We’ve also delivered bespoke residential workshops for the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the School of Advanced Research, and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, and developed a dedicated scholarship programme for doctoral students with Columbia and Duke.
Bespoke Courses, Tailored by Level
Our courses are crafted for universities, foundations, and academic presses, and tailored to the distinct challenges scholars face at each stage of their career. Some examples of bespoke courses:
- Senior Project Workshop (Undergraduates)
For students undertaking a senior thesis or capstone project, this workshop introduces the foundational tools of narrative nonfiction — scene, stakes, structure, and voice — to help students move beyond summary and into original, compelling argument. Students learn to bring the same rigor to their prose that they bring to their research. - Field to Page (Doctoral Students)
Fieldwork generates far more than a dissertation can hold. This course helps doctoral students translate raw field notes, interviews, and observations into vivid, theoretically-grounded prose, building the narrative and descriptive muscles that will serve them through the dissertation and beyond. Students learn to write scenes that carry theoretical weight, and to find the story inside their data. - First Book Workshop (Assistant Professors and Scholars Under Contract for a First Book)
Designed for scholars transforming a dissertation into a first book, this workshop addresses the central tension of the early career: writing a book that satisfies the demands of tenure while also becoming the unique, theoretically-lively, beautifully-written book the author dreams of writing. Students reimagine their dissertation’s core questions in an entirely new form, developing a vital authorial voice, renegotiating their relationship to citation, and identifying the narrative and conceptual threads that carry a book from cover to cover. - Second Book and Beyond (Senior Scholars)
For scholars with a first book behind them, this course offers space to take greater creative and structural risks. Senior scholars often arrive with more freedom — from the constraints of the tenure clock, from the shadow of the dissertation — and this workshop helps them use that freedom deliberately: experimenting with form, voice, and structure while deepening the scholarly ambition of the work. - Public Facing (Scholars Writing for a Broader Audience)
For academics seeking to bring their research to readers beyond the discipline, this course focuses on the specific craft demands of public-facing writing: clarity without oversimplification, narrative propulsion, and a voice that invites a general reader in without sacrificing intellectual substance. Students learn to translate scholarly stakes into stakes any reader can feel.
Our Pedagogy
Syllabi include craft lessons on writing scenes and compelling narratives; honing images and metaphors; shaping prose at the sentence level; and negotiating structure and theory, in balance with the demands of scholarly representational forms and methods. Our pedagogy incorporates close reading, writing exercises, embodied group activities, one-on-one meetings, and individual feedback.
Program Formats
- Block Program — A discounted block of courses from our pre-existing online classes (Creatively, Public Facing, First Book, Personally, and Creative Nonfiction)
- Summer Program — Four days, three to six hours a day of in-person instruction, tailored to your institution’s needs. An intensive workshop designed to kickstart or revive a project while learning and applying the tools of creative writing.
- Hybrid Program — Two days, three to six hours a day of in-person instruction, followed by four weeks, three hours a week online, tailored to your institution’s needs. Students generate 25 pages of new material, revise existing material, and outline a bigger project.
- Virtual Program — A five-week, three-hours-a-week bespoke online course tailored to your institution’s needs. Students generate 25 pages of new material, revise existing material, and outline a bigger project.
If you would like to discuss a bespoke workshop for your institution, please get in touch via our contact form.