Your Academic Job Talk Must Include a Resolution

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. Building off of Chaps. 13 and 14 , this chapter articulates the principles for selecting and describing the third piece of scholarship discussed in an academic job talk and argues that this piece is strategically selected because the speaker predicts that it will help them resolve a conflict that arose when discussing the first two pieces of scholarship, earlier on in the talk. As such, this chapter details the core features of this “resolution story” of the talk and its connection to the two other pieces of scholarship discussed in Chaps. 13 and 14 .