This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here, we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, we share stories lessons and helpful habits from our writing lives so we're really delighted today to get to speak with nina caputo and liz clark nina caputo is an associate professor in the department of history here at the university of florida she's a scholar of medieval jewish history and interfaith relations in medieval europe She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Florida International University, and has been a recipient of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship and a Dorist Fellowship at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. 
She is the author of Nachmanides in Medieval Catalonia, History, Community, Messianism, and Debating Truth, the Barcelona Disputation of 1263, a Graphic History, which was illustrated by Liz Clark, which is why we have both author and scholar and illustrator with us here today. Liz Clark, the illustrator, lives in Cape Town, where she works as an illustrator. She's contributed to the genre of graphic history internationally, and her work is featured in seven books published by Oxford University Press. And I wonder, Nina, if you could start by telling us how this came about, that you two worked together on debating truth, this graphic history by Oxford. Yeah, of course. Actually, I came to discover this series at Oxford through my colleague, Ronald Schechter, when we were together on a fellowship in Oxford. 
And he appeared one day in October with this amazing book in hand and said, look, my comic book is out. My graphic history is out. I'm like, what is that? And his book was called Mendoza the Jew, and it was also illustrated by Liz. And I looked at it, and it was this kind of amazing innovation that allowed – this story, a really interesting story about this Jewish boxer in 18th and 19th century England to be laid out both in text and in illustrated form, in comic book form. And I was taken by it and I sat down with him and he said, well, I'll put you in touch with my editor because I immediately had an idea of what I wanted to work on. 
I got in touch with the editor at Oxford and he then, after lots of back and forth and discussion about how this might look, he put me in touch with Liz. who had, as I said, already done two or three of those graphic histories for the Oxford University Press. And so when you said you already had an idea, was this topic something you were thinking of writing in your regular historian way? Well, I had actually already written about it as it formed a discussion of this event of the Barcelona Disputation was a chapter in my book. I had been working on it for a long time. It's a fascinating kind of moment in history, but also textual moment. a bit of textual evidence. 
And it seemed perfect for the genre. And, you know, looking back on it, if I had ever imagined that someone would make a comic book or a graphic history out of a theological debate, it just seems mad. But it seems to, it works well. And what we did was we actually did two perspectives. We brought it from the, we sort of told the story twice, once from the Jewish perspective and once from the Christian perspective, which was a way of kind of breaking down the difficulty of dealing with two very similar but different texts. So for you, this came about in large part because of this wonderful serendipitous meeting with this other author of one of these books. Yeah, 100%. It would never have occurred to me. 
And I know actually many people who use your graphic history in their Intro to Judaism classes and have loved using it. Liz, on your end, how does this work? How do you become involved and how do you select? which works you're going to be part of, if it is the case that an editor presents these ideas to you? The editor will contact me and say he's been in touch with an author, he's got an interesting idea, and then he'll put us in touch with each other and we'll start discussing it. And we'll put together a book proposal with a few pages of graphic history to show what the art's going to look like. And if that's successful, we go ahead with the whole book. 
And for you, what are you thinking about when you're deciding if it's a project you want to work on? I think it's one of the great things about working on this series has been the variety of subject matters. It's very interesting for me. But I think you can tell if something is going to be a good story visually or not. What is the story about? And sort of amend themselves more to being visual stories or not. I think that the editor often will have already weeded out ones that clearly aren't going to. have the visual component that's really going to work. Yeah, I think generally, when something is brought to me, it's got a lot of potential. And yeah, I can see that it's going to make a good graphic history. 
Can you say more about this visual component in case our listeners are thinking, I think I have an idea for a graphic history? What should they be looking for checking to, to kind of vet it in their own mind, whether it might work? I think it's surprising sometimes what things do work visually. You know, I've done some things which seem very based in text and they worked really well. I guess that when I say does it work visually, I'm thinking more in terms of a narrative. You know, is it going to be able to adapt into a narrative structure that's going to make a good graphic history? Rather than that it has to be something that you immediately go, oh, this is sort of cinematic, just straight off. 
We can usually make that work anyway. So does that mean you're thinking from the start, I can imagine panels, individual scenes? Is that what you're thinking about? I think that you can see that it's going to make a good story, that it's going to start somewhere and move somewhere. And it's often good if it's focused on people that you know are going to make good characters because you are now dealing with a story, even though obviously it's factual. Yeah, it is going to but in the medium of comic books. Right. So did you two work together in terms of figuring out what these pictures would be, what the text beside the pictures would be? How did that work in terms of figuring that out, Nina? 
Well, it was actually... This is the first time I've actually ever seen Liz because we worked entirely on email. So it's very nice to meet you, Liz, or at least to see you, even if you can't see me. Essentially, what we did was... The first thing Liz asked me was about physical attributes. And most of the characters that appeared in my book, we do not know anything about their physical attributes. We know a little bit about what the king may have looked like and perhaps what a couple of the other characters may have looked like. But Nachmanides, we know nothing about. We don't know anything about the friars. And so it was kind of what qualities do you want this person to have? 
How do you want this person to look? How do you want this person to stand? You know, what kind of clothing should this person wear? And for me, this meant going into a kind of research that I'd never done in terms of textiles, representations of people, how people comported themselves, what Jews wore, what Christians wore, what colors were popular at the time. So all these things are things that I, as an intellectual historian, I never, ever thought about or dealt with. And so the first thing that Liz did was ask me to come up with some of these kind of characteristics. And she basically... She sketched out the main characters and gave me a couple of different options to choose from. And we used those as kind of characters for the – so she gave me three and I chose one of those three. 
And some of the questions that came up, would Nachmanides have had a beard? And, you know, we decided to give him a short, very sort of modest beard rather than a long beard or no beard, even though both of those could have been options because that was the – you know, in terms of the popular – the way that people comported themselves at his social class. in the time and place that seemed appropriate. It was both in observance of Jewish law and kind of right for the place. So these were some of the questions that we came up with. And in each case, as we plotted out the story over the long term, I would send her basically pages, how the pages should be laid out, how many cells would be on each page, what the text would be. 
And as we went through, she kind of goaded me away from my tendency to dump large amounts of texts into each panel. And I think by the end, I was being much more kind of conservative about what I said. But initially, I was very, very wedded to the text as it appeared. And so I would send her the layout of the page. I would sketch it out for her. And this is how many cells. This is where I want Nachmanides to be standing. This is kind of the palette that I would like to see. And then she would get it back to me. And the first round would be rough drawings and pencil, and then there would be later inked once we figured out exactly how we wanted it to look. 
Yeah, so that really is very collaborative. And Liz, I'm guessing with the amount of text, this must have been just partly based on your experience with graphic history. What is your sense of sort of how much text really works in these? Or how do you try to get a writer? What are you telling them to get it down to so that it's the right amount? just a practical issue of how much space there is on a page for one thing. And you've got to think about pacing. So, yeah, it's generally, you know, be concise, you know, the core of what's being said. And I think that because of the space issue, people who are used to writing for other mediums don't always think about, you know, maybe you've got some little words in there that aren't really contributing to meaning and even cutting one of those is going to help. 
So, yeah, that's something that I can sort of just... remind authors about that every word is valuable in a medium like this. Yeah. So if listeners, again, are interested in writing this kind of history, Oxford's series is actually the only one I'm aware of, although it probably isn't the only one from an academic press, I'm not sure. But it sounds like they'd need to pitch it to that editor at Oxford. And then it seems like you are the go-to illustrator. Yeah. There are others. I've done most of the books in the series. Okay, yeah. And are you aware, is this something that they, do they want scholars who have at least one, quote, regular book, academic book published? Or what do you think the series or the editors at Oxford are looking for? 
I think they're looking for people who have a good story to tell. Most of the people who have done it have been relatively senior scholars. or I've been in the field for a while, but I think they are just looking for things that would communicate an idea well. And many of these, if not all of them, deal with some kind of marginal population, sort of because it gives an opportunity to visualize something that might not be easily represented in historical images. The first one, Abina, has been, it just went into a third edition, I think. So that one has been the most successful. And I think that there's been a little bit of, they're not as keen to just jump into it any longer because I think none of the others has been as successful as that one. 
I may be wrong, but that's my sense. And when you say successful, is this a matter of prizes or sales? What are you thinking of? I think sales. I think, you know, I think ultimately it's been used by lots of people who don't know anything about African history and who want to put something that's substantial into their class. And so the latest edition, I think, has got other scholars contributing to it in addition to the initial author, but I haven't seen it yet. I just got an ad for it, but it actually fits into a number of different kinds of curricula. Whereas I think that debating truth is more specialized. It's going to go only to specific kinds of classes. And Liz, from your perspective or your interaction with the editors, do you have any insights into what the editors might be looking for from perspective authors or pitches? 
I don't really, I think, um, The series is quite well established now. I think that they probably have a very good idea of what to explore and what to just reject immediately. I don't know what they're actually looking for at present. Okay. I wonder for each of you why this work, why being part of this kind of collaborative book is fun and meaningful and worth the time in your career. Liz, let me just start with you. Why do you choose to do this kind of illustration? I find it really interesting. I get to learn a bit of history each time. These are never subjects that I know anything about. I didn't study history, but it's personally interesting. And as an artist, there are interesting challenges that come with it. 
Sometimes working within constraints actually can be more rewarding. So sometimes when you are dealing with something that isn't an obvious subject for art, that can actually be allow you to be more creative in some ways. Yeah, it's just a very interesting, varied job to do. Do you feel like you're teaching historians or scholars something about the visual? I would imagine for many academics, they're not used to thinking about that. I think it varies from author to author. Some of them have come with a greater knowledge of comics and graphic novels than others. But yeah, I think it's always a very collaborative process. So, yeah, they're teaching me things. I'm teaching them things. That's great. And Nina, what about for you? I definitely learned an amazing amount from Liz because as someone who never actually read comic books as a child and have limited experience and only since I started working on this project in graphic histories or graphic narratives, it was kind of a deep plunge into an unknown world. 
And so talking to me when she was telling me about pacing and how to make – a page actually communicate in the most effective way, how to make the reader want to turn the page for the rest of the story, I learned a lot about not only about the graphic medium, but also about how a story should be told. What are the components? How do you kind of lay out a narrative for people who don't have necessarily any commitment to that narrative? What is it that you need? I've known something about that. I read a lot of books and I write a lot, but... I hadn't thought about it in that way. And so that was something that I learned a lot from the way the collaboration worked. 
I had to put this together. And I was also translating the text as we went because I did a new translation. So I would spend the evening translating and then sort of figuring out how I wanted the text that I translated put into the graphic. And so it was very much a learning process as I went. When you say learning about how to – how to make the reader want to turn the page, which I agree is something that we scholars are not always used to thinking about. Did that entail thinking about building in suspense? Or what, practically speaking, were you trying to add? You know, I was trying to think about how to make the characters appealing or at least sympathetic. And so since we do it from both perspectives, once from the Jewish perspective, once from the Christian perspective, part of what I wanted to do was to make the reader identify with the characters, 
in different ways in those two different parts of the text. You don't have any real control over how a prose book unfolds in terms of where the pages get turned, but in this you really do. You really have a sense of how the palette changes, how the shadows on the characters' faces change, what the lighting is in the background, what the room might have felt like or looked like. And so those things have an impact on the way that the graphic unfolds. Yeah. Liz, I wonder if that means, are you helping writers figure out what to bring out more or accentuate in character or story? What do you do to help authors like Nina figure out how to make this more of a page turner? 
I think that, again, that will be a bit different from script to script. But, you know, some of them we will work on a script more so that develop it and others also will be quite confident about what they're doing and they'll deliver me a very finished script. I think that a lot of what I do probably comes in more as I start to sketch and we can then discuss how it's translated into images and make changes where we need to then. I also wondered if either of you had heard much about the reception or how this book has been received and used Liz, do you hear back from readers or teachers? Occasionally they get nice things. I think usually they'll be getting in touch with the author rather than me. 
And Nina? Yeah, I mean, I've heard a number of colleagues have said that they use it and they enjoy using it and the students enjoy it. You know, I'm using it this semester in my class and it's a little bit awkward teaching your own book. But it's also, you know, it's the only one like that out there. So it seems like it's a good thing to do. But yeah, so people have, I have... heard from a number of people who say they really like using it. That's great. I also wonder, Nina, about how this book factors into tenure and promotion. Many listeners will wonder, does this count what's happened in your case? Well, it varies from person to person. My colleague, Jennifer Ria, who wrote on Perpetua, also working with Liz in Classics, she was promoted to full on the basis of her book. 
I gave me a slight bump in my salary and nothing else. So it depends on the department TMP regulations, at least at this university. In my department, it didn't count as a research project. So I'm still glad I did it. It would have been nice if I'd been promoted on it, but... Is that something, I mean, do you think that scholars can advocate for more? Is there a way, do you think, to make the case for this counting? Again, I think it really depends on the institution, on the department. I mean, I think... Again, in a department that has, for example, original translation as a promotable product, then it's perfectly fine. In my department, it needs to be an academic book with an academic press. 
So I got the second part, but this is counted as a textbook, which does not actually lead to promotion in my department. I think it really varies. And I guess it depends on what the university is trying to accomplish with tenure and promotion. by far, this book has reached more people than anything else I've written, right? There's no way that even a fraction of the people who have looked at this have looked at anything else I've written. And so in that respect, it should be rewarded. But again, it really depends on the department and the university and what they are kind of rewarding for. Some of our listeners have wondered if when an academic chooses one of these more creative types of books or projects, 
does it lead to other kinds of possibilities or invitations or collaborations or projects? Nina did this book? No, I mean, I've had a lot of people ask if I'm going to do another one. And I think that I've got some things that I would love to play with, but they're not in my field. And they're not sort of my expertise. I've had a number of opportunities to speak about this in public, which have been wonderful, a lot of different kinds of settings. And so that's been great. And even though I've been working on the disputation for a long time, I have not been called upon to sort of speak about it specifically, because it was part of a bigger project. So that's been great. 
But no, I have not had any other kind of creative endeavors come my way. Did it make you think about doing different things than you think you might have had you not done this project? You know, for a moment, I thought about writing a regular textbook. And then I decided, no, that's not something I want to do. But no, I don't think so. I mean, I think this was just it was kind of a very serendipitous thing. And it was kind of a labor of love. I didn't think I would get promoted on it. I just really enjoyed it. And I think that this is a really useful story to tell for understanding Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages and the complexities of those relations, which tend to be stereotyped as always Jews being persecuted and Jews having a stumbling box put in front of them in terms of achieving what they need to achieve. 
And I think this can case is a unique example where it's much more complicated. So I think it's useful for that. And I think it's kind of a fun story. It's like this sort of heroic story. Definitely. Yeah. Liz, I'm wondering if listeners are thinking about graphic histories, is this generally the process wherein they do not need to know an illustrator themselves? They should probably look for presses that do this and then the press takes care of the finding the illustrator or matching them? Do you know if that's how it generally works? It works both ways. I think actually, yeah, I mean, quite often, I think that you'll get an author-illustrator pair coming to a publisher. But obviously, for me, it has generally been through the press, although I have been contacted directly by authors and collaborated with them without coming through a press. 
So yeah, in my experience, it's usually that the author will be paired up with an illustrator by the publisher, but it does work both ways. Great. There's a couple of questions we ask most guests. And one of them is about if there's something we usually ask, is there something you wish you had known earlier in your career about writing or publishing since we are focused on writing and publishing? So for Liz, I wonder just in your experience with academics who might be thinking about this kind of graphic history, is there something you can tell it would be good for them to have realized this or to know this? sort of earlier if they were thinking about doing a graphic history? I think that the main thing with most of the authors is just getting the hang of how much space you have for the words and that you do have to change your writing style a little bit. 
It is about the pictures. The only thing also that authors sometimes have to adjust to is remembering that the pictures are also communicating directly to the reader and You don't need the words and the pictures to be saying the same thing twice. And they can actually work together and support each other to create a complete message. So learning to do that can be a little bit of a learning curve for some authors. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And Nina, I wonder if there's something more broadly about writing or publishing that you realized, gee, this would have been helpful to know earlier in my academic career. I can't really think of it. I mean, in terms of writing this book, the thing that I wish I had known in the beginning 
the process of the project was now I'm completely forgetting the name of the book, but Matthew McCloud's, what is comics? Is that right? What are comics? Scott McCloud. Scott McCloud. Yes. Thank you. I'm forgetting the title and the, and the author, which was understanding comics. Yes. Understanding comics. Right. When I, when I found it, it was kind of an amazing experience because it actually kind of told me along with what Elizabeth had been helping me with, how comics work, how people read them, because i really hadn't been trained in how to read a comic. And that's part of what i like to do when i teach also, when i teach this book, like, how do you read this? And so had i known that before i went into this, I think that the process at the very beginning would have been very different. 
And I think that the it's possible that the book might have been more, less compact, like it would have i would have i would have put less into it, if that makes sense. In terms of publishing, this was an amazing experience. Working with the editor, Charles Cavalieri, was great. He was really attentive and answered lots of questions and really advocated for me and immediately put me in touch with Liz, which was fantastic. I've never had that kind of experience with an editor before. And the editing of the text for the book was also pretty exceptional because half of the book is comic, is illustrated, and half of it is text. And the editors at Oxford were did a wonderful job as well. And so that was, that was really helpful. 
And writing that also, you know, writing that sort of textbook style, which is not the kind of style that we write in our articles and monographs. It was how, it was a very different experience for me. Like it, it made me think about, you know, what does my reader bring to this? So like, I can't assume a certain base of knowledge. This is for undergraduates or high school students, or maybe even bar mitzvah kids, you know, bar mitzvah kids. It's, It's not going to appeal to people who have a broad range of understanding of medieval history. Not to say that I dumbed it down, but I sort of had to start at really ground zero and build a foundation for it. So that was also an interesting experience because I had never had to do that before with my work. 
That's interesting what you said about the editing that you received. We've had many guests who've sort of complained or commented that at an academic press, they're really not getting much editorial. So I guess... your folks there were really had an eye to what works for a graphic history. It's, it's not, it's actually not out of their academic division. It's out of their textbook division. So it's different. I think that they have, I think that they might have editors on staff there, whereas, you know, they often send out academic works to, you know, freelance editors. So it's a different, it's, you know, this is a different market. And so I think that they want to kind of address that market. And relatedly, was the price better than most academic presses, books? 
Yeah, I think it's like $19, $24. And now I think that a lot of – since so many people have assigned it for classes, it's now – there's a sort of used – a whole circulating group of used copies that are available. And I think they also just released an e-book, if I'm not mistaken, which is nice to know. Yeah. Yeah. That is great. Back to the question that some listeners will wonder, when might I do this type of thing if I'm interested in doing a graphic history? It sounds like post-tenure book is likely, and then you might want to check with the department about how this will count, if it will count. Yeah, I definitely get a sense of how this would fit into your dossier, because it is a lot of work, and it will definitely take you away. 
This took me away from a... I got... I got onto this project during a sabbatical and I had been planning to work on a very different project. And that whole project was waylaid by this, which was, you know, I don't regret it, but it also means that I have, you know, my timetable changed radically as a consequence. Yeah. Some people might assume this takes a lot less time than a regular book. Maybe it does. I'm curious how, how long do you each feel you spend on this graphic history, Liz, for you? How much time is it? It depends how many pages I'm drawing. I think these ones usually be in somewhere between six and eight months of work for me. And, you know, you probably have things you have to do before it gets to the Liz stage. 
How long did you spend on it? And I was also working on it during the academic year as well. So it meant that it took up a lot, you know, at the time that I would have been spending doing research and writing. I was focusing on this. Okay. Wondering if there's anything else you want to share with listeners about this process, what it requires, what was unexpected, unexpected benefits or drawbacks that might be interesting for our academic audience. writer listeners to hear about. Liz, anything come to mind? First of all, some of the authors don't anticipate is how many questions I'm going to be asking them and how much they're going to have to try to help me figure out what things looked like, what cases and people looked like. 
They may or may not be records that we can use. And yeah, how much they're going to have me say, now, hang on, where was that? What did that look like? Does that mean you're asking about what would be in a home in a certain at a certain time, or what type, what length of skirt a woman likely would have worn then, those sort of details. Well, definitely, you know, if this is inside a home, then what would an interior look like for that person of that class, that background at that time in a place? You know, I need to know what the furniture looked like to get things generally right. You know, we may not have every detail perfect, but we do want to try and get close. 
So yeah, there's a lot of going into what the physical space looked like and what the clothes looked like that maybe authors don't realize that I'm going to need to know. Yeah. And does it extend to dialogue too? Are you asking authors about, is this a word or an expression that would have been used or what kind of slang was common at the time? I usually don't get too involved with the dialogue. I mean, if something really occurs to me as I'm reading it, then I will query them, but that's not usually the case. I'm not usually that careful on the writing. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And it gets back to Nina's point about these are details that most of us scholars and even historians aren't necessarily used to paying attention to. 
Nina, what about from you? This is absolutely correct. I was surprised at both how many questions and how canny and right on the mark her questions were. And they were about things that I, again, never think about. What kind of shoes would Nahmanides have been wearing? And I never thought of him as an embodied person. I always thought of him purely as text. And so this was a whole kind of shift in the way I was thinking. And that wasn't expected. I mean, both my own thinking about that and working with Liz, who was so attentive to this detail. The other thing that's been a little bit unexpected in terms of the responses to this, I've received some negative responses also. There was one physician from Switzerland who wrote to me and was very angry that Nachmanides was not wearing a kippah and did not have long forelocks and did not have a long beard. 
And this just seemed absolutely unacceptable to him. the Orthodox Jews in your community. And he continued to write back to me and tell me that he did not like what I had done. So I stopped writing with him. But, you know, I have received some critical responses to the depiction. And, you know, in dealing with, that was another unexpected thing, dealing with somebody who's a really well-known sort of iconic figure who is not usually depicted generates anxiety among some readers. And so that wasn't expecting that. graphic part of it, but the kind of textbook part of it. I think I've become less tent on using academies in my writing, which is not a bad thing at all. I still use it, of course, but I think that I'm a little bit more aware of it. 
And I think about writing in slightly different ways. Like I really enjoy writing, but it's something that takes a lot of time. And I don't always set aside a whole day to do it anymore, which is what I used to do. And when I was writing the graphic, I basically had like two hours after everything else I had done in the evening that I can work on this. And so I'm more comfortable doing that than I once was. Yeah. And that brings me to another question we usually ask guests, which is if there is a writing practice or habit that you're using that is working for you lately. Liz, I don't know if you are also a writer. No. Okay. And Nina, what about you? 
I think that's it. I mean, essentially, I'm more comfortable. I'm trying to be more – I'm trying to – remove myself from this idea that I need to be focused always on this one project, focused on writing for large blocks of time and that writing is something I can do between other things. I don't think I do it as well that way, but it's something that I can at least get started in small pieces. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that too. I really appreciate your making the time for us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. 
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