This article seeks to inspire humanities and social science faculty to explore ways of utilizing existing scholarly online communities to engage students in the process of academic inquiry. The author discusses her own experience using a discipline-specific listserv, shares successful assignments, examples of student postings and a grading rubric. Analyzing student work, she argues that by observing the often messy debates authors and scholars engage in before producing published work, students can uncover the process of discipline-specific inquiry and begin to imagine themselves as potential participants. With appropriate preparation, students can also be empowered to contribute their own knowledge to an expert online community--a learning experience that is often hard to simulate in the classroom. (Contains 1 footnote.)