essay clusters
postmedieval is looking for guest editors to conceptualize, organize, and edit essay clusters for publication in our open-topic issues (of which there are 2 per year). Responsibilities include soliciting contributions, liaising with authors and helping them develop and polish their work, and writing an introduction. One person may act as a cluster editor, or a team of 2 or 3 people. It’s common for a cluster to emerge from a conference panel or symposium, but that’s just one way it might happen. If your cluster is accepted, we will work with you to develop a timeline to publication. Most clusters consist of between 3 and 7 individual articles, plus an introduction. Individual articles can be quite variable in length, usually falling between 3,500 and 8,000 words each.
There are no editorial costs involved, and the guest editors will have the support of the Editors-in-Chief, the Managing Editor, the Palgrave Springer production team, and members of the Editorial Board. Guest Editors will receive a physical copy of the published issue, and their introduction will be permanently free-to-view online. Contributors will receive a pdf of their published article and a “Share Link” for sharing it with a wider readership. Palgrave Springer does not generally make their content Open Access (outside of a fee of $2780 USD per article or some other prior institutional arrangement). Authors are permitted to self-archive an accepted manuscript version of their article (prior to copyediting and typesetting).
Download the proposal questionnaire here. Please return this form to postmedievalED@gmail.com. Essay clusters will be considered on a rolling basis. Questions should be directed to postmedievalED@gmail.com.
The proposal questionnaire will be reviewed by the Editors-in-Chief as well as members of the Editorial Board. Answers may be brief, and we recognize that some inquiries are overlapping -- so, if you’ve answered it in one place, you don’t necessarily have to repeat yourself in another!
Proposal questionnaire
1) Name(s) and contact information of guest editor(s):
2) [OPTIONAL] Affiliation(s) and/or biographical information for guest editor(s):
3) Proposed title or topic of the essay cluster:
4) In 200 to 300 words, please provide a description of the proposed cluster:
5) Does the cluster emerge out of an event, like a conference, class, or symposium? If so, please describe briefly.
6) Why does this cluster belong in postmedieval? In what ways does the topic speak to the journal’s aims and scope (see https://www.palgrave.com/gp/journal/41280/authors/aims-scope)? We encourage you to speak to one or more of the following points: how the cluster will be theoretically or methodologically adventurous; how it will take a collective, inclusive, or experimental approach to the generation of knowledge; how it will help readers to imagine new meanings of the premodern or the medieval; or how it will expand the journal’s ambit, whether in terms of discipline, language tradition, cultural archive, mode of inquiry, or style of discourse.
7) How will the essay cluster be accountable to values of equity, inclusion, access, and justice? Answers might address the anticipated subject-matter of the cluster, citation practices, outreach to potential contributors, and/or the diversity of perspectives included.
8) [OPTIONAL] All contributions to postmedieval will need to be reviewed by suitable peer-reviewers, who have a demonstrated understanding of the topic at hand and an ability to evaluate the intellectual intervention of the proposed cluster. Please use this space to provide names of potential peer-reviewers for the cluster (and feel free to share any other ideas you have relevant to peer review).
9) [OPTIONAL] If your cluster is accepted, we will work with you to develop a timeline to publication. If you anticipate constraints on your schedule, or if you’d like to share details likely to affect the timeline, feel free to share those here.
10) [OPTIONAL] Anything else we should know? Please use this space to provide additional information that may be helpful for the postmedieval editors and board-members to consider.