Reviews of Peer-Reviewed Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences
We give you the scuttlebutt on academic journals—aiding you in selecting the right journal for publication—in reviews that are sometimes snarky, sometimes lengthy, always helpful. Written by Princeton University graduate students and Wendy Laura Belcher.
Public Culture
For those interested in publishing theoretically rigorous articles with an attention to critically engaging inequality and difference (social, cultural) as it manifests in various ways locally, globally, and in media. Regularly publishes some of the most cited articles in cultural studies.
For those interested in publishing articles that take an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of culture, using ethnography, interpretive tools, and other methods to discuss the emergence of particular public phenomena. (BH)
Public Culture is an interdisciplinary journal featuring works that explore the public manifestations of culture and how those manifestations speak to larger questions of inequality, difference, and other areas of intellectual concern.
Scholarship in this journal is drawn heavily from ethnographic research, analysis of literary, film, and movie texts, as well as readings of news media and political events. The dominant debates across disciplines track into the journal, including questions around materiality, affect, social stratification and inequality, empire, migration, materiality, and infrastructure.
While no set framework of analysis is prescribed by the journal, most articles apply Marxist, intersectional, feminist, post-colonial, or post-modern frames, reflecting the journal’s theoretical commitment to understanding questions of inequality, difference, and social oppression in its various forms and moments of recognition.
Recent special issues on water, infrastructure, and most recently on maps, reflects a growing interest in the question of space, built environment, and the role of geography in moving other disciplines, like anthropology, to take on these issues. Overall, the journal appears to pride itself on being a venue for some of the most cutting edge work on culture and allowing a range of different styles, topics, and debates to be presented in the journal’s pages. (BH)
An interdisciplinary journal that publishes primarily professors, many of whom are Sr. scholars. (HP)
Useful for Submission
Word Count: 6,000 to 9,000
Issues per year: 3
Current volume number: 29
Articles per year: 18 (not including interviews)
Citation style: Chicago Manual of Style and their own citation guide located on their website
Abstract length (if required): 250 words max
Upcoming special issues (if available): last special issue was on maps and cartography
Relevant Editors: Shamus Khan
About Wendy Belcher
