From the Editors

It hasn’t been that long since my previous Editor’s Note, but this is my last opportunity to write one before my editorial term ends, so I can’t resist making a few remarks in addition to offering the usual round-up of recent publications. I’m happy to announce that after some considerable effort on the part of our supporters at Johns Hopkins University Press, Print Plus publications will now be indexed on Google Scholar (in addition to continuing to be indexed by the MLA). This is another...

I’m very pleased to announce that in January Print Plus received the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ inaugural Best Digital Feature award. The citation praised the platform as “a model to which print scholarly journals with a digital component might aspire,” specifically referencing the variety of forums and our “breathtaking array of content.” This is the second major award for the platform since Debra Rae Cohen launched it in 2016. A lot of editorial blood, sweat, and, well, maybe a...

Thanks to everyone who joined the Modernist Studies Association’s online workshop “Publishing in Modernism/modernity” in mid-November, where panelists Santanu Das, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Beryl Pong recounted their experiences with the journal and took questions from participants. Anne Fernald and I were there as Coeditors, also taking questions. As we said several times then: please feel free to reach out to Anne or me with questions or concerns about the journal. It might take a few days...

My previous (and first) editor’s note opened with a mild joke about how endless the opening month or so of 2020 had seemed. Simpler times: “the beforetime,” as we all seem to have spontaneously agreed to call it. The onset of the COVID-19-era has not made putting out a journal any easier: pretty much everything we’ve worked on from the first half of this year has been, or still is, late. The not-so-new still-not-normal has really brought to the fore that in important ways there is no “the...

It’s already become a standard joke that the first month or so of this year has surely been one of the longest decades any of us have lived through. But the alerts on our phones, the decorations in the stores, and the unflappable, implacable calendar remind us that 2020 is really just getting started. And maybe, just maybe, that will turn out to be a good thing IRL (vote early and often, Reader). I can say with confidence that there is a lot to look forward to within the friendly confines of the...

I’ve been writing to you in this space since Print Plus was launched, touting the versatility of the platform and its potential for encouraging discussion, its ability to respond to the state and concerns of the field of modernist studies, its ability to accommodate new modes of academic discourse. If there’s still some way to go in realizing these utopian visions, I do feel that the platform has achieved the main goal that Matt Huculak and I set out when we first conceived it: to make Modernism...

With the just-posted “Responses to the Responses to the Special Issue . . .” Modernism/modernity brings to a close what we might call the Year of Weak Theory. We’ve run responses to the issue of September 2018 in five invigorating dollops—and now, in this sixth tranche, we've let the authors from the special issue have the final say. Except, of course, that it won’t be final. Just as the Print Plus platform couldn’t contain (or, perhaps, represent) the full measure of discussion about the issue...

The release of Megan Quigley’s Print Plus cluster on “The Waste Land” and #MeToo earlier this spring sparked a new round of a familiar plaint here at Modernism/modernity—“How can I get copies?” “How can I share this with my classes?” Given the media-savviness of most of our students, chances are that they could figure it out for themselves; but we’ve been missing a convenient link between page and pedagogy. Now, we’re happy to say, we have one. M/m has partnered with the non-profit Hypothesis...

Thank goodness for the vagaries of academic publishing, which often result in M/m’s January issue coming out late enough in February to allow me to deliver one more barrage of news under the rubric of “2018.” (As if we hadn’t heard enough from that year—I know.) Though some of you may have heard this news through other media, I thought it was important to acknowledge here on the Print Plus platform itself the honor that we have just been accorded by the Association of American Publishers: the...

The recent MSA conference in Columbus—full of fabulous presentations as it was—reminded me anew that the real energy of such events gathers and builds in the roundtables. Or in the bar, or over coffee, or wherever discussion spills over beyond its allotted 90 minutes. We’re trying to duplicate that energy here on Print Plus. One of our main goals when we established the platform was to provide a mechanism for expanding and extending discussion beyond the bounds of a single issue of the journal...

The schedule for print issues of Modernism/modernity—like so many institutional features of the university—seems to be designed for a different time, a different model of the academic life. September, November, January, April—you can imagine the issues arriving to mark the new semesters, waiting in a plumply full mailbox for the scholar’s return from the summer’s solitary composition or self-care, from the Ransom Center, MacDowell, the Hamptons, or perhaps a gîte in the Dordogne. If few of us...

Two years into this Print Plus project, the platform is both an established, integral part of Modernism/modernity and an ongoing experiment. On one hand, the platform is properly indexed by the MLA as part of the journal; readers have learned to visit the platform, to use its links to engage with both arms of the journal; scholars propose Print Plus-specific pieces that take advantage of our ability to embed media, or forums designed for our innovative cluster format. On the other, we’re all too...

Taking refuge inside a profession . . . is only taking refuge; it is not answer to the goads all of us receive just by reading the morning’s news. —Edward Said What’s the role of an editor, now, in the academic public turn? We can issue a call, and get out of the way; we can tend our own gardens, and, like so many of our colleagues, recalibrate our pedagogies; we can, perhaps most saliently, remind our authors that the public is not singular, and was always already there. I thought about this...

I woke up yesterday morning to find my Twitter feed in an uproar, with outraged UK academics piling on to disparage, rebut, and generally mock the comments of Andrew Adonis, Chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, on the subject of the “sacrosanct” academic “ 3 mth summer holiday.” Baron Adonis—as the mordantly witty Aidan Byrne points out, there’s an added piquancy to this yearly chestnut being warmed over by an “ermine-clad lord”—apparently draws on his long-ago stint as a Research...

A year ago, Modernism/modernity, amid excitement and trepidation, launched this platform with the aim of renewing and enlivening the journal and extending its reach—making it possible to include a range of media as integral parts of articles, to introduce innovative new formats for publication and new modes of collaboration, to respond in real time to compelling events, to continue conversations (and take issue) across platforms, to grow and change in response to the needs of our scholarly...

A journalist friend of mine complained a couple of days ago that “the downside of writing about the Trump era is you spend two hours writing and even worse shit has erupted in the meantime.” I know what he means. In the week since I set out to write this brief note—an invitation to continue, in a new blog forum, the work of Lesley Wheeler’s current posting on “Scholarship and Justice”—the very earth seems to have shifted beneath our feet. Threats have become reality. Neologisms have erupted...

As Lesley Wheeler—and others—reminded us in last cycle’s Process blog, the model of the solitary academic has always been an inadequate and misleading one. All editors know this: collaboration is built into every stage of our process. We rely, for peer review, on the good will and shared standards of the community; we navigate, with authors, the sometimes rocky waters of line editing; we develop, increasingly, and by design, editorial formats that foster discussion—with the hope that our...

Volume 1, Issue 2 What is a journal “issue”? Glancing over to my bookshelf with its arrayed white rows of M/ms past, I see what James Mussell has called the periodical’s “ dynamic of seriality” made manifest: each issue is new, unique, yet advertises its newness within a framework of repetition. With this second “issue”—perhaps better termed “cycle”—of M/m’s Print Plus platform, we begin to embrace the mode of seriality made possible by digital publication: rather than one discrete and contained...

In their editorial introduction to the first issue of Modernism/modernity, Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg declared their intention to “convey some sense of the grand ambition and scope” of the modernists by modeling in the journal the ferment of the period, “contestation . . . between old and new orders, of course, but also between various divisions of the intellectual endeavor.” If from the outset interdisciplinary “border crossings” were key to the vision of the journal, so too was...