One of the core motivations behind the project aspeers is to foster and encourage academic exchange among students in European American Studies - and related fields. Accordingly, most of our authors will be eager to discuss their work with an audience of fellow students.
If you decide to use one of our articles in your teaching, we will be happy to contact the author and ask if s/he has time for an extended discussion. We will then offer to provide the necessary infrastructure for an exchange between your class and the author (beyond the simple comment function available for every article by default). In the spirit of aspeers as an open access graduate journal, we strongly encourage these discussions to be public. However, if you prefer a protected space accessible only to your group, we are ready to provide that as well.
We believe that using aspeers's contributions in a seminar setting offers several benefits:
- Generally, the author will be available and happy to discuss his/her thoughts with a group of students.
- Reading a peer's perspective on a text or subject provides not necessarily a different angle, but a different twist as compared to other secondary material. Students will read a scholarly text differently knowing that it has been written by a fellow student in the field.
- It introduces students to the idea of publishing their work early on and helps them develop a notion of what a publishable text on the graduate level looks like.
If you are teaching in American Studies (or a related field) and would like to stay informed about the project, please contact us at editors@aspeers.com. More importantly, if you are taching in American Studies or a related field, do tell your students about our project and our homepage at www.aspeers.com.