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Your guide to a successful academic career that centers joy and avoids burnout.
Academic life is often imagined as a straight path—publish, earn tenure, keep producing—but the reality is far messier. In An Academic Life Worth Living, Tanya Maria Golash-Boza draws on decades of experience as a scholar, teacher, mentor, and academic leader to offer a clear-eyed, compassionate account of how to write, publish, and sustain a joyful professional life.
Having moved across continents and career stages while raising three children, Golash-Boza blends personal stories—from fieldwork and family life to tenure reviews and leadership roles—into concrete strategies for developing sustainable writing practices and making intentional career choices. In the process, she demystifies academic labor while confronting the structural pressures that make burnout feel inevitable. An Academic Life Worth Living is a pragmatic guide for anyone seeking to do meaningful scholarly work without sacrificing health, family, or purpose.
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced; Executive Director of the University of California Washington Center; and author of six previous books.
“Engaging, captivating, and a joy to read. This book is full of indispensable insider knowledge for successfully navigating academia as an early-career scholar, dismantling the ‘hidden curriculum’ of junior faculty life. Tanya Golash-Boza has a gift for distilling the most valuable methods from her own professional and personal life and rendering them legible across a vast range of disciplines and fields. While reading, I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me that?’”—Miroslava Chávez-Garcia, coauthor of Is Grad School for Me? Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students
“Golash-Boza delivers actionable strategies in an empathetic, collegial voice—warm but authoritative, thoughtful but pragmatic, and always anticipating readers’ concerns. This is a unique guide to building a sustainable and joyful working life, and every academic needs it on their bookshelf now more than ever."—Yasmin Moll, author of The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt