Your Academic Job Talk Must Engage the Audience

This chapter details the principles for selecting and describing scholarship in an academic job talk. In particular, the chapter conceptualizes the job talk as a story of the speaker’s research program. Constructing this story involves strategically selecting three pieces of scholarship to discuss during the talk and in a way that is informed by principles of storytelling in film, namely the concept of the film trilogy. This chapter articulates principles for selecting and describing the first piece of scholarship discussed in an academic job talk and argues that this piece is strategically selected because the speaker predicts that it will facilitate engaging the audience of the job talk. As such, this chapter details core features of this “engaging story” of the talk and its connection to the two other pieces of scholarship discussed in Chaps. 14 and 15 .