postmedieval is searching for new co-editors-in-chief! Please spread the word and consider applying!

Deadline: October 1, 2023.

We seek to recruit up to FOUR new Editors-in-Chief (EiCs) – 

two EiCs to begin three-year terms in January 2024; two to start in January 2025. (Staggered start dates will allow current editors to move out of their roles in rolling sequence. The total number of co-editors-in-chief will rise from three to four.)

Responsibilities of Editors-in-Chief are as follows: 

• Helping to lead the journal into the future, guided by intellectual vision and ethical/political principles, in collaboration with co-editors and the editorial board

• Soliciting content for the journal (open-topic articles, essay clusters, and special issues), with the goal of publishing four issues annually

• Managing the peer-review process

• Editing (developmental editing, line editing, and copy editing – probably the largest single time commitment)

• Collaborating with the journal’s editorial board to maintain and strengthen the journal’s self-governance and profile

• Developing initiatives to make postmedieval more accessible, visible, and active.

Note that the publisher, Palgrave Springer, does not substantially remunerate the position of EiC; payment is limited to a small annual stipend. The hours of work per week vary with publication-schedule but regularly range between 5 and 15 hours/week. Editors-in-Chief are aided by a part-time, salaried Managing Editor, responsible for many of the day-to-day operations of the journal. We ask that new editors plan to occupy the role for at least three years from their start date.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies is a quarterly academic journal that publishes theoretically driven scholarship on premodernity and its ongoing reverberations. Contributions are characterized by conceptual adventure, stylistic experiment, political urgency, or surprising encounter. Our aim is to facilitate collaborative, ethical, and experimental engagements with the medieval – with its archives and art, its thought and practices, its traces and its enduring possibilities. The current editors and editorial board are committed to expanding the fields of knowledge and geography represented in the journal, by showcasing scholarship that reaches across disciplines, language traditions, locales, modes of inquiry, and levels of access. 

A full catalogue of postmedieval’s issues to date is available here. This content is largely paywalled. If you lack access, please write to postmedievalED@gmail.com to request a representative sample of articles.  

The journal is seeking diverse editorial leadership, to help define what a theoretically minded premodern studies can be – across disciplines, language traditions, identity positions, locales, modes of inquiry, and levels of access. 

Applications are warmly invited from scholars in all fields of premodern studies, including but not limited to the disciplines of Art History, History, Languages and Literatures, Musicology, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies, and/or in subfields like Gender and Sexuality, Ecocriticism, Global Medieval Studies, and Medievalism. Early Modernists who are medievally inclined would be very welcome. 

Selection of new editors will be made by a committee consisting of current EiCs (Shazia Jagot, Julie Orlemanski, and Sara Ritchey) and members of postmedieval’s editorial board. The plan is to conduct online interviews after an initial review of applications.

To apply, please send a CV (short-format is fine) as well as a brief cover letter (2-page max) addressing the following three prompts. Note: CVs are requested to establish details of career history and intellectual and publishing experience, rather than prestige; many different academic trajectories would be welcomed and valued.

Prompts (to be addressed in the cover-letter):

• Your vision for the future of postmedieval

• Prior experience that has prepared you for this editorial role (whether in editing, academic organizing and leadership, collaborative scholarship, and/or involvement in the publishing process) 

• Your sense of how an editorial position at postmedieval fits into the logistics of your life over a three year term (January 2024–December 2026 or January 2025–December 2027) as well as longer-term professional and intellectual goals. Please specify whether you would prefer to start in 2024 or 2025 and how strong this preference is. 

Completed applications should be sent to postmedievalED@gmail.com. Also, feel free to reach out with any questions!

APPLICATION DEADLINE: OCTOBER 1

Image from previous page 'Gemini constellations' by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sūfī, New York Public Library, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.