Abstract
This chapter examines the challenges of grant writing faced by new non-Anglophone academics who have taken positions in English North American universities. Drawing on a case study, which includes a discourse analysis of proposal drafts and interviews with a new non-Anglophone scientist, the chapter illustrates how the academic practice of grant writing in the “fiercely competitive” Anglophone academia (Hyland 2007) may be challenging for non-Anglophone scholars to master. The chapter explains how discursive practices of different national academic systems shape and require different scholarly identities. The chapter concludes by providing possible ways in which new non-Anglophone academics can be assisted in understanding the genre system of the grant proposal.
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Notes
- 1.
Happily, at the time of writing Grigory had already been tenured (LY).
- 2.
James Fallows in his January/February 2010 article in The Atlantic quotes a Nobel Prize winner and the President of the U.S. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Harold Varmus: “My favourite statistic is that one-quarter of the members of the National Academy of Sciences were born abroad. We may not be so good on the pipeline of producing new scientists, but the country is still a very effective magnet” (p. 46). Figures for The Royal Society of Canada are even higher: well over a third of its fellows are foreign-born, and a quarter of all fellows are non-Anglophone (RSC Communications Office April 2010).
- 3.
This is an allusion. Five-year economic plans became history in 1991, with the break-up of the USSR. But since a North American reader is still likely to associate the concept with centralized government intervention in the former Soviet countries, its draw was irresistible.
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Yousoubova, L. (2011). Genre and Disciplinarity: The Challenge of Grant Writing for New Non-Anglophone Scientists. In: McAlpine, L., Amundsen, C. (eds) Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors and Administrators. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0507-4_8
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