Wendi Kavanaugh

Welcome!

Wendi Kavanaugh, PhD., is a Dallas native. Her academic journey reflects her passion for creativity, history, and storytelling.

  • What to Expect in 2026

    A Guided Year of Scholarship and Creativity I wanted to keep my welcome post separate from my “What to Expect in 2026” post. I believe introducing the blog and outlining what to expect are two distinct topics. Typically, the “What…

  • No Post this Week

    I had planned to post today about “The Power of Small Wins” and how tiny steps help me gain momentum in my research and work. However, this week brought a different kind of small win: allowing myself to pause. I’m…

  • My Academic Momentum Map

    Finding Your Way Back Into the Work To start the month, we worked through a clear set of steps. But what do you do when…

  • Do you have 15 minutes?

    A review of Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day During a meeting where I was struggling to write my proposal, my PhD advisor…

  • Building Academic Momentum

    The Mid-Semester Slump It’s that time of the semester – the slump/slip/dip/mid-semester blues. The name doesn’t matter; what matters is recognizing what’s happening and knowing…

  • Why I’m Starting This Blog

    Connecting Research, Reading, and Exploration After finishing my PhD and trying to figure out where I fit in the postdoc world, I kept coming back to the small, everyday pieces of academic life that never make it into a dissertation.…

  • Momentum

    How to Set Realistic Goals for Your Writing Momentum isn’t something you passively wait for; it’s something you actively build through small, consistent actions, even on days when your document feels burdensome compared to your motivation. As we enter March,…

  • The Academic Writing Cycle

    A Brutally Honest Look A confession: academic writing isn’t a straight path but more of a looping, spiraling, sometimes wild adventure. So I tried to…