This article explains on how to pitch an op-ed as an academic.
Updated: August 14, 2026
ASALH’s 2024 annual meeting in Pittsburgh was organized around “African Americans and the Arts.” The conference itself leaned into the city: August Wilson, the Pittsburgh Courier, photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, local Black history, artistic production, and the long fight over who gets to preserve and interpret Black life. On September 26, Professor Donna J. Nicol and I presented From Research to Recognition: Cultivating Public Visibility as an Academic.
Historians have one unfair advantage in the news cycle: public culture keeps discovering things for the first time, and historians have archives.
The timing is the annoying part. Historical research is built through documents, absences, contradictions, context, and arguments with dead people who remain surprisingly difficult. An opinion editor may want to know by 3 p.m. why any of this changes the story everybody is talking about today.
That question can be clarifying. The history belongs in an op-ed when it changes the interpretation of a live argument. A court decision, anniversary, election, policy fight, cultural controversy, or supposedly unprecedented event may create the opening. The history earns its place by showing that the present story looks different once the record enters it.
ASALH’s Pittsburgh meeting connected scholarship to the city’s Black artistic and historical traditions, including August Wilson and the Pittsburgh Courier.
The pitch can therefore be much plainer than the research behind it. What is happening now? What does the historical record make visible that the current conversation is missing? What is the claim? Which publication already makes room for arguments of this kind? The evidence still matters enormously. It just does not have to stand in the doorway and make the reader wait outside before hearing why the argument exists.
Donna made the session better because she brought the author side of public work into it, including the uncomfortable part where the piece leaves your hands. An editor may sit on it, an institution may react, and the argument may produce consequences the scholar did not control. Public scholarship is still scholarship, and it also enters a world that does not promise to behave like a seminar.
Perhaps that is why I liked discussing it at ASALH. The conference theme was already about Black art as history, memory, cultural expression, and power. The archive was never sitting quietly in the past to begin with.
