University Press Week: Q&A on the Scholarly Publishing Collective

We’re celebrating University Press Week by participating in a blog tour! Today, we’re joining several presses in describing how we #KeepUP by innovating and collaborating. After reading our post, visit the Temple University Press blog to learn about North Broad Press, check out the University of North Georgia Press’s post about their collaboration with Affordable Learning Georgia, and read the University of Cincinnati Press’s post on when a book is more than the printed word. Syracuse University Press writes about audiobooks today, Texas Tech University Press spotlights collaborations with organizations dedicated to publishing early-career writers, and the University of Notre Dame Press highlights its new grant-funded projects. Oregon State University Press describes local collaborations addressing climate change, Leuven University Press posts about the KU Leuven Fund for Open Access, Princeton University Press discusses its Supporting Diverse Voices Grants, and Athabasca University Press presents a collaboration with the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. Finally, Clemson University Press launches a new imprint with a local library consortium, Bucknell University Press discusses partnerships between small and large university presses, the University of Toronto Press covers the relationship between editors and marketers, and Columbia University Press presents a Q&A about changes in book publishing and design. We hope you’ll take some time to check out a few of these great projects!

In 2021, Duke University Press partnered with Longleaf Services to provide journal fulfillment services to Cornell University Press, Texas Tech University Press, and UNC Press. In January 2022, Duke University Press will debut an expanded set of services with the full launch of the Scholarly Publishing Collective (“the Collective”). The Collective will provide journal services including subscription management, fulfillment, hosting, and institutional marketing and sales and will welcome four new partners: Michigan State University Press, Penn State University Press, SBL Press, and the University of Illinois Press. For University Press Week, we spoke with Allison Belan, Director for Strategic Innovation and Services at Duke University Press, about what the Collective is, what it hopes to do, and what it means for the future of university press publishing.

What is the Scholarly Publishing Collective?

The Scholarly Publishing Collective is an initiative from Duke University Press, begun in response to needs we were hearing from fellow university press journal publishers (“UPs”). UPs face a dearth of options for infrastructure, sales, and hosting. The Scholarly Publishing Collective affords these publishers, especially those who don’t have the resources that we have built over the last fifteen years, a vibrant and sustainable option. 

Essentially, the Collective offers the nonprofit scholarly publishing community—largely UPs or society publishers—some core services: subscription and fulfillment management for print and/or electronic subscriptions; direct collection sales to the institutional and consortium market; and digital content hosting and access fulfillment.

What is Duke University Press’s role in the Collective?

Duke University Press has developed infrastructure for our own publishing program that we can share with our fellow UP journal publishers and society publishers, to support them at a time when sustaining their journals program is critical to sustaining their overall mission. Our technology toolkit lets us scale our hosting infrastructure to support 150 additional journals on top of our sixty and more in the future. More than fifteen years of investment and experience and skill-building have gone into being able to do this, and we want to leverage our experience for our Collective partners. 

Part of the theme for this year’s University Press Week, “Keep UP,” is a celebration of how UP publishing has changed over the past decade. Do you think something like the Collective would have been possible ten years ago?

Another way to think about the question might be “Was it needed ten years ago?” And the answer is probably “No.” There were a greater number of providers in these different service spaces then. In addition, there were ways other than direct subscriptions for UP journal programs to basically generate the revenue they needed and make the scholarship available in the formats that librarians wanted, such as by licensing the journal content to aggregators and earning royalties on it. 

In the last ten years, though, both the services marketplace and the institutional marketplace have changed significantly. There are many fewer options available to nonprofit journal publishers to offer and fulfill institutional subscriptions to electronic journals, and revenues from aggregation royalties have leveled off or are not as easy to access for new journals. Several UPs eliminated their subscription sales and content platform management capabilities between 2010 and 2015, turning to JSTOR’s hosting and direct subscription services and the Project MUSE aggregation, as well as others, to generate revenue. When JSTOR announced the sunset of its Journal Hosting Program at the end of 2021, it left a lot of nonprofit publishers without institutional order management and digital hosting capabilities. In addition, consolidation means we’re down to just a handful of commercial platform service providers and a handful of journal subscription and fulfillment management services.

But the piece of the puzzle that’s really been missing in recent years is marketing and sales to international institutions and to consortia. These markets have become so much more critical in the last decade as sales to North American institutions have slowed. And when you move into the international market, you’re often trying to get the attention of consortia who can only engage if the publisher brings a certain bulk to the table. They cannot manage deals with a multitude of smaller publishers. It’s more important than ever to reach these markets to grow and sustain the overall mission, and UPs and societies don’t necessarily have the in-house marketing and sales expertise necessary to navigate this really specific context.

The other part of the University Press Week theme focuses on how UPs produce “forward-thinking work,” making them “a force to keep up with.” How does the Collective contribute to that?

I see “Keep UP” as an imperative, one that then requires “forward-thinking work.” The Collective is happening now because several UP journal publishers saw the need to keep up at the same time that they were losing the capacity to do so, as the services market consolidated and the consortium market changed. That drove the group to have conversations that weren’t possible in the past. I remember times—2007, 2010, 2014—when folks in the UP journal world tried to explore collaborations, saying “We have a shared set of interests. Could we combine our resources? Could we cooperate more?” Those conversations typically faltered at “But we’re competitors, and we’re doing okay on our own. Maybe we don’t need to.” 

Clearly, we’ve reached a point where we need to collaborate. That’s especially true given that so many services out there are geared toward marketing and presenting STEM content. The Collective is a recognition that university presses know humanities and social science journals the best and understand the market for them the best. 

Do you see the Scholarly Publishing Collective as a way for university presses to demonstrate to their journal editors and societies that, yes, UPs are the right place to be?

Absolutely. Very few UPs on their own can offer what the commercial publishers can in terms of raw resources and income. But through the Collective, the partners expand their ability to disseminate, promote, and increase the impact of scholarship.  

The Collective’s online platform provider is Silverchair. In addition to hosting Duke University Press’s e-book and digital journal collections, Silverchair is home to publications from the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Wolters Kluwer. The Collective publishers can say to their editors and members, “You are getting the best digital publishing platform technology there is, while also benefiting from the responsive and individualized care that a university press provides.” 

Through the Collective, the publishers can also offer journals sales representation to the global library market, including large consortia that wouldn’t otherwise be able to engage with a single publisher. The Duke University Press sales team has long-standing relationships in that market. Our team is known and respected and appreciated by consortia representatives and sales agents, and we can tap into that to bring attention to the publishers’ collections and journals.

Do you see increased collaboration along these lines as the future of UP publishing?

I do. It’s my hope that we, the scholarly journals community, will continue to find ways to leverage our knowledge, expertise, and skill to enrich the entire community. Journal publishing is a complex business and it’s challenging to do it well. We see the Collective as a space in which current and future partners can all get a closer look at what each is doing particularly well and then share that knowledge and these strategies and tactics, as well as cultivate new collaborations. The UP community is noted for its generosity; as our publishers gain insights that could benefit the whole, we can share them through all the channels that AUPresses makes available to us, like UP Commons, webinars, and annual meeting sessions.

Open Access Week: Demography, a Community-Funded Journal

To celebrate Open Access Week, we’re proud to spotlight Demography, the journal of the Population Association of America. Duke University Press became the publisher of Demography beginning with its 2021 volume, converting the journal from a for-profit commercial subscription model to fully open access.

Since its founding in 1964, Demography has mirrored the vitality, diversity, high intellectual standard, and wide impact of the field on which it reports. Demography presents the highest-quality original population research of scholars in a broad range of disciplines that includes anthropology, biology, economics, geography, history, psychology, public health, sociology, and statistics. The journal encompasses a wide variety of methodological approaches to research. Its geographic focus is global, and it has a broad temporal scope.

Popular articles recently include “Academic Achievement of Children in Same- and Different-Sex-Parented Families,” “Pain Trends Among American Adults, 2002–2018,” “The Effect(s) of Teen Pregnancy,” and “Depends Who’s Asking: Interviewer Effects in Demographic and Health Surveys Abortion Data.”

Demography’s open-access funding model relies entirely on financial support from libraries and other institutions. More than 75 institutions have joined Demography as community partners, making annual commitments from $500 to over $4,000.

“The conversion of Demography is a significant opportunity for the library community to join with other stakeholders in support of sustainable, open-access, university-based publishing,” wrote Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives at library membership organization LYRASIS.

Demography has the top citation ranking in its Social Sciences Citation Index category for 2020 and the second highest impact factor, 3.984, in the category. The journal was cited 9,798 times in 2020.

“The open-access model received a lot of kudos from researchers everywhere, but especially in Europe and the Global South,” wrote Mark D. Hayward, the journal’s editor. “From my end, I couldn’t be happier with the journal’s new model. I think it gets our results into the field faster and helps the science in major ways.”

“We were excited to see the announcement that Demography had switched to a fully open-access model with Duke University Press,” wrote Colleen Lyons, Head of Scholarly Communications at the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, which is one of the journal’s community partners. “Demography is an important journal in the field and for faculty at our institution, and we are pleased to provide support to make sure this journal can continue to publish great research in a more financially viable way. Efforts like this one move the needle towards a more sustainable publishing system that prioritizes the advancement of human knowledge.”

The support of many organizations ensures that Demography’s content is available open access for population researchers all over the globe. Learn how your institution can become a community partner.

Open Access Week: Trans Asia Photography joins Duke University Press

To kick off Open Access Week this year, we’re proud to announce that Trans Asia Photography, an open-access journal, is joining the Duke University Press publishing program beginning with its 2022 volume. We’re thrilled to have TAP on board!

TAP, a biannual journal edited by Deepali Dewan, Yi Gu, and Thy Phu, is the first and only open-access international peer-reviewed journal devoted to the interdisciplinary exploration of historic and contemporary photography from Asia and across the Asian diaspora. The journal examines all aspects of photographic history, theory, and practice by centering images in or of Asia, conceived here as a territory, network, and cultural imaginary. Bridging photography and area studies, the journal rethinks transnational and transcultural approaches and methodologies. The journal brings together the perspectives of scholars, critics, and creatives across the humanities and social sciences to advance original and innovative research on photography and Asia, and to reflect and encourage quality, depth, and breadth in the field’s development. 

“The editorial team of Trans Asia Photography is thrilled to join Duke University Press,” wrote the editors. “Since its founding more than a decade ago, TAP has maintained its commitment to be at the forefront of scholarship on Asia and photography, both nurturing and reflecting this emerging field. Central to its success has been a commitment to open-access publication, which has allowed us to move beyond a western academic audience to scholars, curators, artists, and professionals in Asia and beyond. We are excited that Duke University Press shares our commitment to open-access principles. Indeed, we can think of no better home than Duke for carrying out the journal’s vision for transforming the history of photography by centering Asia and for re-thinking Asia through the study of photography.”

From the beginning, the journal was conceived as an online resource where readers from anywhere could read about previously unknown histories of photography, engage with new ways of thinking about past and present photographic work, see photographs that otherwise would be unavailable to them, and learn about relevant books, archives, exhibitions, and symposia. By centering photographic practices of Asia and its diasporas, the journal foregrounds multiple ways of seeing, knowing, and being, which are distinct yet inseparable from other regional formations.

“The addition of TAP adds another exciting publication to DUP’s growing list of outstanding open-access titles,” wrote Erich Staib, Associate Journals Director. “We are delighted to be working together with the editors to further develop the journal and increase its global profile. TAP joins DUP’s broad presence in Asian studies and will be a strong complement to the publishing we do across the field and beyond it.”

Recent issues of the journal have centered on the title’s keywords “trans” and “Asia,” and readers can look forward to TAP’s spring issue examining “photography” to close out this series. Future issues of the journal will focus on themes of amateurism, photobooks, and digitalities.

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Conceptualizing COVID Syllabus

Today, Duke University Press publishes our Conceptualizing COVID Syllabus. The articles, special sections, and special issues collected in this syllabus represent some early attempts to conceptualize how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the discourse in the humanities and social sciences in 2021.

All included articles are freely available through the end of the year. Start reading here.

The Conceptualizing COVID Syllabus joins a long list of staff-curated syllabi addressing some of today’s most pressing social issues, including racial justice, prison and the carceral state, global immigration, and more. Find the full list of syllabi here.

Q&A with Heather Berg, editor of “Reading Sex Work”

Contributors to “Reading Sex Work,” a new issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly, theorize sexual labor as both work and a site of labor resistance and transformation. Rather than critiquing sex work itself, they highlight sex workers’ own production of knowledge for navigating racial capitalism, state violence, and economic precarity. In today’s Q&A, issue editor Heather Berg discusses what sets “Reading Sex Work” apart and highlights a few of its contributions. Check out the issue’s contents here, including an interview with femi babylon, which is free through the end of November.

What makes “Reading Sex Work” unique or essential? What does it do that no other collection has done before?

What I hoped to do with this issue was to turn a sex work lens outward rather than a civilian (non-sex worker) gaze in. There’s a lot of fatigue in sex worker communities with the academy’s fascination with sex workers’ stories. One of the things this issue is interested in is that proliferation of scholarly interest. The pieces focus less on learning new things about sex workers than they do sex workers’ confrontations with outsiders’ ideas about their work. That comes through most directly where the authors theorize from their own locations as sex workers. It also comes through in pieces where authors engage fieldwork or literature to think about the politics of knowledge production about sexual labor. What happens when the material realities of sex work run up against theoretical ideas conceived outside that context? How does a sex work lens shift how we read Marxist political economy on the wage, feminist theorizing on gendered performance, or queer of color theorizing on pleasure politics?

The issue is also turning away from making appeals for inclusion or trying to convince anti-sex worker readers to shift their perspective. As crucial as those strategies are, they can leave little room for the stickier questions I wanted to foreground in this issue. Svati Shah’s piece gets at this tension directly, asking sex work scholars to rethink our participation in “the debate.” This is in line with a broader turn in sex workers’ own political strategy, where volumes such as the recent We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival are more and more refusing to try to convince readers who aren’t coming in good faith anyway. The essays included in this issue take as a given that sex work is work (if also sometimes anti-work), and the issue’s address is to readers who are already ready to meet us on those terms. 

How do you imagine “Reading Sex Work” could be used in courses or as a basis for future scholarship?

I hope the issue is useful to sex work scholars, who will find fresh perspectives on big questions that are vexing the field. Vanessa Carlisle and femi babylon’s pieces, for example, engage in different ways with what we mean when we call sex work “work.” I think this marks an important departure from (again, really crucial) writing that fights so hard to show that sex work is just work that it can’t ask that question. Julian Glover and Jayne Swift’s pieces will offer new insights on the politics of pleasure, and disrupt the common idea that only workers who have all their material needs met care about it. This shifts, I think, how scholars and organizers might talk about pleasure and survival in what we call the “whorerarchy.”

“The essays included in this issue take as a given that sex work is work (if also sometimes anti-work), and the issue’s address is to readers who are already ready to meet us on those terms.”

I also hope that scholars who don’t write or teach about sex work will use the issue to think about what sex workers’ encounters with knowledge production might have to say about the questions that are most immediate for them. Those interested in platform economies will find new insight about workplace control and resistance in Kate Hardy and Camille Barbagallo’s essay, while those interested in informal labor will find in Svati Shah’s essay key interventions on how we should think about the state.

Scholars of service work will find in the two pieces from Annie McClanahan and Jon-David Settell and Gregory Mitchell and Thaddeus Blanchette new ways to think about what gets sold in service work and what that means for those who enter into the exchange. Crucially, both pieces remind that the exchange doesn’t mean the same thing for workers and consumers.

Finally, the issue is as much for sex worker readers (paywall withstanding) as it is for those curious to learn more. I hope sex working readers will find pieces that feel generative, even as those of us in the academy wrestle with questions of extraction that can’t be easily smoothed over.

Explore the contents of “Reading Sex Work” here, or pick up a copy.

Summer reading recommendations from our staff

It’s officially summer in the northern hemisphere! Looking for a good vacation read? Our staff have you covered with a bunch of great recommendations. We hope you’ll pick up one of these books (or a few!) from your local indie bookstore.

Kristen Twardowski, Library Sales Manager, recommends Made for Love by Alissa Nutting, a “hysterical summer read about technology, surveillance, and escaping your megalomaniac billionaire husband who may or may not want to upload your brain to a computer chip. You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp, you’ll throw your iPhone into the sea, and you’ll wonder if you should move into a senior living community before age 40. Just the prescription for 2021.”

“An underground cabal of white men (and some women) secretly controlling events at and around a university in North Carolina?! Obviously this is the premise for a work of fantasy: Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, about a Black girl who comes to an early college program at UNC only to get swept up into a history of magic and secret societies,” says Editor Elizabeth Ault. “Deonn weaves together a wonderful sense of place—the book begins at one of my favorite Durham summer spots, the Eno River Quarry—and braids together Arthurian and Black Southern magical traditions in a moving and absorbing way that manages to be genuinely surprising. The worst part about this book is that it’s clearly the setup for a series; book 2 can’t come fast enough!”

Chris Robinson, Senior Copywriter, recommends Greg Bear’s The Forge of God. “It’s a first contact with aliens book that is unlike all the others I’ve read (any more will spoil the ending) where the alien visitors send all kinds of mixed messages upon arrival. There are a lot of strands running through it: religion, politics, physics, and more developed characters (geologists, oceanographers, White House officials, everyday regular folks who just get caught up in it) than a lot of sci-fi books.”

The Silence of Bones by June Hur is Exhibits Manager Jes Malitoris’s pick: a “murder mystery set in 19th-century Korea, from the perspective of a young woman who serves as an indentured servant to the capital city police; a great page-turner with an ending that surprised me. It is a young adult book (and you can definitely feel it at times in the characterization), but even as an adult reader this was a really enjoyable, complex mystery.”

Project Editor Annie Lubinsky endorses Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott. “The author, a lifelong fan of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, has created a new adventure for the two characters. Jeeves has been called upon to help the British secret service, and the organization pulls in Bertie Wooster as well. The world will be very familiar to Wodehouse fans, and the antics Bertie gets up to are laugh-out-loud funny. (The book is fully authorized by the Wodehouse Estate, and it’s easy to see why!)”

“Mick Herron’s Slough House series of novels are my idea of perfect vacation reads,” says Charles Brower, Senior Project Editor. “There are seven so far, starting with Slow Horses and including this year’s Slough House, about a group of British intelligence agents stuck in a dead-end London posting because they screwed up or have addiction or anger issues or got on the wrong side of powerful people. Their struggles with their demons mirror Britain’s struggles with Brexit and the ghosts of colonialism and the Cold War. The novels are cleverly plotted and hilarious, and I’ve developed great affection for these very flawed heroes.”

“I love steampunk, fantasy, and magic, so A Master of Djinn was a great book for me,” says Erica Woods Tucker, Production Coordinator. “P. Djèlí Clark does a great job intertwining lots of elements into a book that you can’t put down. The main character, Fatma el-Sha’arawi, is a badass. She knows martial arts, is brilliant, and can do the impossible; her partners are women who are also badass and could have several books of their own. I sailed through this book in a few days. I can’t wait until the next book comes out (there are two small prequels you can check out that are in the same universe). It feels like Fatma has a lot more stories.”

“My favorite vacation read is always a sprawling historical novel, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls fits that description,” says Laura Sell, Publicity and Advertising Manager. “It’s the story of Vivian Morris, who drops out of Vassar in 1940 and moves to New York City to live above a crumbling vaudeville theater that her eccentric aunt owns. Over 500 pages we follow Vivian as she immerses herself in the world of theater and nightlife, makes friends and mistakes, and ultimately learns what she wants from life and love. The book is so richly imagined you can smell the greasepaint, taste the martinis, and hear the jazz as you read.”

“My brother sent me a copy of singer Rickie Lee Jones’s memoir Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Jones spent her formative years in the same part of Phoenix that my brother and I grew up in, and she knew some people we knew, so the section about her youth was particularly poignant for me. This memoir is honest and compelling; Jones’s writing, like her singing voice, is quirky, distinctive, and insightful,” says Patty Chase, Digital Content Manager.

Lastly, Project Editor Lisa Lawley recommends two nonfiction books: The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights by Dorothy Wickenden and Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by Nicole Eustace. “I like when my reads have synergy and both of these books have a lot to say about community. The Agitators follows a group of friends who, despite different temperaments and priorities, pull mostly together to effect abolition in the U.S. and eventually win the vote for women. Insights into the wartime activities of Harriet Tubman, the dynamics of upper-class marriage in the nineteenth century, and a fraught political climate discomfitingly like our own are a bonus. Covered with Night juxtaposes the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee’s concept of reparative justice and the harsh punitive system of colonial America that continues today as members of both communities work to resolve the 1722 murder in Pennsylvania of a Seneca man, Sawantaeny, by two fur traders disgruntled about a trade. The resulting Treaty of 1722, the oldest continuously operating agreement still in our country’s history, was constructed through dialogue between Taquatarensaely—‘Captain Civility’—and other Native leaders with frightened representatives of the colony, who expected harsh reprisal instead of an invitation and path to forgiveness alongside continued inclusion in the Nations’ circles of community.”

2022 Pricing Updates from Duke University Press

In continued recognition of the financial changes that many libraries face as a result of COVID-19, for the second year in a row, Duke University Press will maintain existing prices for the 2022 calendar year for our journals and select electronic collection products.

Pricing will remain unchanged for the e-Duke Books and e-Duke Journals collections, DMJ 100, Euclid Prime, and direct journal subscriptions (with the exception of Prism, which will increase in frequency in 2022). Detailed information is available at dukeupress.edu/libraries. If your library has a custom deal, the library relations team will be in touch in August to confirm your renewal pricing.

Journal Updates

Duke University Press is pleased to announce the addition of Agricultural History to its 2022 list. Agricultural History, founded in 1927, is the journal of record in its field, publishing articles on all aspects of the history of agriculture and rural life with no geographical or temporal limits. It is published quarterly on behalf of the Agricultural History Society. Agricultural History will be included in the e-Duke Journals Expanded collection.

Demography, the flagship journal of the Population Association of America, joined Duke University Press earlier this year and is now available open access. Demography’s fully open-access funding model relies entirely on financial support from libraries and research centers. Learn how your institution can contribute.

Beginning in 2022, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature will publish an annual monographic supplement, in addition to its biannual issues, increasing the journal frequency from two to three issues per volume.

Open Access Community Investment Program launches to support OA publishing

Duke University Press is pleased to partner with LYRASIS and Transitioning Society Publications to Open Access (TSPOA) to launch the Open Access Community Investment Program, a project that matches libraries, consortia, and other prospective scholarly publishing funders with nonprofit publishers and journals seeking financial investments to support open-access publishing. Environmental Humanities, an open-access journal published by Duke University Press, is participating in the project’s pilot phase. Learn more about funding through TSPOA.

Annals of Mathematics joins Project Euclid

The Annals of Mathematics, one of the world’s leading mathematics journals, will be hosted on the Project Euclid platform beginning with the 2022 publication year. The Annals is published by the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University with the cooperation of the Institute for Advanced Study. Duke University Press will manage subscription fulfillment and hosting in coordination with Project Euclid.

Scholarly Publishing Collective

Beginning in 2022, Duke University Press will provide journal services including subscription management, fulfillment, hosting, and institutional marketing and sales in a collaboration called the Scholarly Publishing Collective. Partner publishers include Longleaf Services, Michigan State University Press, Penn State University Press, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the University of Illinois Press. Pricing for titles that are part of the Scholarly Publishing Collective will be announced in July 2021.

For more information about 2022 pricing, please contact libraryrelations@dukeupress.edu.

Q&A with GLQ editors C. Riley Snorton and Jennifer DeVere Brody

We’re more than pleased to welcome C. Riley Snorton, professor at the University of Chicago, as the newest coeditor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. In today’s blog post, he and coeditor Jennifer DeVere Brody discuss their involvement with and vision for the journal. Learn more about GLQ or subscribe here.

What is your professional background, and how did you come to be involved with GLQ? What drew you to the journal?

CRS: I am a writer and professor with training in media and cultural studies and working broadly in the fields of Black studies, queer studies, and transgender studies. I am also involved in movements that work for the liberation of Black, queer and trans lives. I first encountered GLQ as an undergraduate women and gender studies major, and the journal has been a recurring touchpoint in my formal and political education. My first publication in GLQ underscores that point, as I was honored to write a short piece of reflection for the 25^th anniversary of Cathy Cohen’s noted essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (GLQ, 1997). Cohen’s essay, to my mind, remains a key example of how queer studies has always had a deep relationship with queer activism.

There were many reasons I was drawn to the journal. It is an honor to serve the field in this capacity, and I feel fortunate to have served alongside Jennifer DeVere Brody and Marcia Ochoa. I greatly admired and am inspired by the editors and editorial team at GLQ and was eager to experience the sociality of queer scholarship through editorial and curatorial work. I also value the short form—the article—as a writing and thinking exercise.

JDB: The editorial team was eager to solidify intellectual connections between Black, queer, and trans studies and we looked to C. Riley Snorton’s scholarship as a model. His contribution for our 25^th anniversary issue commented on the most cited essay by Cathy Cohen and we all knew him to be a superb collaborator. It is a joy to work with him and the editorial collective that now meets regularly on Zoom.

What is your vision for GLQ—how do you hope to shape the journal into the future?

CRS: I’ll start by expressing a shared sensibility among the members of the editorial team to highlight scholarship that extends beyond North American (settler colonial) understandings of sex and sexuality.

I have always thought that queer studies (and Black studies and trans studies, for that matter) can be useful for understanding any sort of phenomena, that is that it is a lens for thinking about power, geography, representation, race, feeling, gender, capital, etc., etc. I am also eager to explore the ways GLQ exists beyond print form, whether that’s by hosting incubators for early career scholars, contributing to or producing podcasts, or deepening our online presence.

JDB: Indeed, we hope to think more about other modes of scholarly engagement and incorporating even more visual, sonic, and interactive events.

What recent topics has the journal covered? Are there forthcoming topics or special issues you’re looking forward to?

CRS: I am proud that my time as coeditor coincides with the release of “Cuir/Queer Américas,” a multilingual conversation happening across multiple journals and multiple countries which represents a culmination of the vision of a collective of scholars (including former coeditor Marcia Ochoa) working on queerness and trans* among Latinx and in the Caribbean and across Latin America.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

CRS: It has been rewarding to work with every member of the editorial team—the State of the Field editors, Books-in-Brief editor, Moving Image, and the associate editors who all bring their vision and expertise to bear on the journal. I am also profoundly grateful to Liz Beasley, GLQ’s managing editor, who is key to keeping all systems running. I want to express respect for every previous editor at the journal and appreciation for the editorial board.

Q&A with Ross King, editor of the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies

We’re thrilled to welcome the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies to our publishing program starting with volume 21, issue 1, which is available now. SJEAS is an open-access, international publication that presents research related to the Sinographic Cosmopolis/Sphere of pre-1945 East Asia, publishing both articles that stay within traditional disciplinary or regional boundaries and works that explore the commonalities and contrasts found in countries of the Sinographic Sphere. Today we’re pleased to share an interview with Ross King, editor of SJEAS.

How would you describe SJEAS to someone new to the journal?

SJEAS was launched in 2000. As an international East Asian humanities journal based at a leading South Korean university with seven centuries of excellence in humanities scholarship (Sungkyunkwan University), SJEAS strives to move away from some of the entrenched biases of ‘East Asian’ studies by focusing on pre-1945 humanities in the Sinographic Cosmopolis/Sinographic Sphere; thus, SJEAS now welcomes contributions on pre-1945 Vietnam, which traditionally was not a focus of the journal. Much of East Asian humanities scholarship today is heavily presentist, while also suffering from eurocentrism and (increasingly) sinocentrism. In ‘East Asian’ studies, there is the additional challenge of ‘national studies’ myopia, whereby scholars tend to focus on just one national tradition, and then typically with a lopsided focus on either vernacular or (rarely) Sinitic sources. Thus, SJEAS aspires to challenge such biases and also include comparative and/or transregional perspectives whenever possible.

When did you join SJEAS as editor, and what drew you to the journal?

I joined in 2018, and was drawn by the fact that it is based in Korea at an institution with a strong tradition in premodern East Asian humanities scholarship: the Sungkyunkwan 成均館 was Korea’s foremost seat of learning from 1398 until the end of the Chosŏn dynasty. South Korean scholars are producing robust, theoretically informed humanities scholarship on the Sinographic Sphere across a wide range of fields, and are keen to join the international conversation while also including voices from scholars in neighbouring East Asian countries.

Why is it important for SJEAS to be published open access?

The original terms of the South Korean government funding that helped launch the journal more than twenty years ago stipulated open access; but beyond just that legal requirement, South Korean academia in general is broadly committed to making publicly funded research as widely and freely accessible as possible, and SKKU and SJEAS share that commitment.

How has the journal changed in recent years, and how do you expect it to continue to evolve in the near future?

The most significant change since I joined has been to narrow the temporal focus to pre-1945 and to specify a long-term preference for humanities research on the Sinographic Cosmopolis (including Vietnam), along with a preference for research in translation studies, broadly defined. In previous decades, SJEAS published quite a few articles on post-1945 topics, including work on quite contemporary issues, but there are so many journals now specializing in modern and contemporary topics, and so few focused on pre-1945 (let along ‘premodern’, however one defines that) topics, that we felt it important to narrow the focus.

What are you looking for in submissions?

We are particularly welcoming of contributions that treat pre-twentieth century (before 1945) topics in the humanities. We are keen to highlight the research achievements of colleagues doing cutting-edge research in China (broadly construed), Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Our preference is for solid, primary-source heavy research rather than cutting-edge theoretical or historical work. Research on Vietnam is explicitly encouraged, as is comparative/transnational research. Because of the journal’s anchor in Korea at SKKU, with its centuries-old ties to Korean cultural tradition, we always welcome research on premodern Korean humanities that engages source materials in Literary Sinitic and/or negotiations between Sinitic and vernacular literary culture. I would emphasize that we are willing to put editorial resources into submissions that might (initially) be on shakier ground in terms of the quality of their academic English, provided the research is new and exciting for an international Anglophone audience, and that the English passes a certain relatively high threshold. But all submissions must engage with relevant western or East Asian scholarship outside the national tradition within which it is produced.

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Three Questions with Ellen Samuels & Elizabeth Freeman, editors of “Crip Temporalities”

Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman are editors of “Crip Temporalities,” a new special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly that explores the ways in which bodily and mental disabilities shape the experience of time. In today’s post, they describe the groundbreaking scholarship of the issue and its relevance both in and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Preview the issue’s table of contents or purchase “Crip Temporalities” here.

What makes “Crip Temporalities” unique or essential? What does it do that no other collection has done before?

Not only is this the first edited volume to focus on crip time and temporalities, it is also groundbreaking in other important ways. We deliberately foregrounded authors and artists of color to counteract the oft-critiqued whiteness of disability studies in the United States. We also included both foundational disability studies figures and those who are relatively new to the field, so the issue could provoke discussions of crip time across fields, generations, and geographies.

“We believe no one can read this issue and come away unchanged.”

Including visual art and poetry was also important to us, as crip time has been realized perhaps most profoundly in recent years through creative works by sick and disabled artists and writers. Their work, as well as the essays themselves, expose the ragged underside of crip time that its smooth intellectual surface can never fully conceal. We believe no one can read this issue and come away unchanged. 

How does the scholarship collected in this issue hold particular relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic?

The essays, poetry, and art in this issue remind us that many people have been living in “pandemic time” before COVID, and many more will thereafter as “long-haul COVID” emerges. Pandemic time blurs the ordinary ways we segment our days and nights, forces us to confront a possibly shortened lifespan, makes us miss “milestone” events, and involves waiting, multitasking, and fumbling deadlines—all experiences that are routine for people with disabilities. This issue uses an intersectional approach to explore how that kind of temporality feels to crips, in and beyond the pandemic, and the variety of power relations that shape both normative time and temporal aberration. During COVID, this issue also shows, we have witnessed institutions making accommodations that they routinely withheld from, or imperfectly and grudgingly bestowed on, people with disabilities: remote work, flex time, deadline extensions, etc. We hope that the issue will resonate with audiences in and beyond disability studies, for whom the past year has created possibilities for alliances between crips and non-crips.

How do you imagine “Crip Temporalities” could be used in courses, or as a basis for future scholarship?

“As disability studies scholarship moves beyond a rights-based model to aspire to disability justice, this collection offers a keystone for that evolution.”

The essays, art, and poetry in this special issue form a cohesive whole that is well-suited to be taught in full. Students can find different entry points to the material in the different genres, as well as the essays, which range from personal to analytical, exploring crip temporality in contexts as varied as a qualitative study of disabled faculty in the US, violence in occupied Palestine, Black feminist digital humanities, Latina/o/x testimonio, and queer- and crip-of-color self-care. Were I teaching this in a disability studies or gender and women’s studies class, I would ask each student to pick one piece from the issue—essay, poem, art—and talk or write about how it relates to their lives or the world around them. I am confident that every reader will find something profound in this issue, starting with Eli Clare’s magnificent and searing poem, composed in the early days of the pandemic.

As disability studies scholarship moves beyond a rights-based model to aspire to disability justice, this collection offers a keystone for that evolution. Disability justice centers the experiences and voices of Black, Indigenous, Latino/a/x, and Asian American disabled people, as well as those who are queer, trans, and/or economically precarious. In accordance with this principle, we sought with “Crip Temporalities” to amplify others’ perspectives and expand the scope of what is published as “disability studies” or “queer studies” or “temporality studies.”

This volume, conceived almost two years ago, appears at a time when the violent devaluing of Black lives in this country—from the malignant neglect of COVID-19 management to the repeated police murders of Black people—constitutes a second pandemic, whose roots run as deep as the nation itself. This volume brings new and important perspectives to a vital ongoing conversation about how disabled bodies get racialized, and how the health, mobility, and bodily functions of racialized populations are compromised.

“‘Crip Temporalities’ is part of a turn in queer studies from spectacularly and knowingly transgressive bodies toward bodies and people who are just getting by, surviving, doing the unglamorous work of self- and mutual care.”

Similarly, “Crip Temporalities” is part of a turn in queer studies from spectacularly and knowingly transgressive bodies toward bodies and people who are just getting by, surviving, doing the unglamorous work of self- and mutual care. Finally, we see the volume as part of the move to revive the genres and modes that count as conceptual critical writing—not only visual art and poetry but also personal narrative, testimonial, manifesto, and beyond—exemplified in the new Duke University Press series Writing Matters!

Learn more about “Crip Temporalities” here.