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  • Journals as Innovators and the Innovation of Journals: The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Keynote Addresses MLA Convention 2004
  • Willis G. Regier, James F. English, and David C. Hanson (bio)

At the 2004 conference of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia, the theme for the keynote session of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) was ‘Journals as Innovators and the Innovation of Journals’ – an idea suggested to us by Hayden Ward, retiring editor of Victorian Poetry (VP). VP itself has been as instrumental in prodding innovation in Victorian studies as in responding to change; likewise, all journals in the humanities aspire to help lead their respective fields, as well as to register how their fields are leading them. A related theme is how journal editors, precisely in thinking about ways to innovate, must periodically remake their journals; and how scholars who may be altogether new to editing, but who wish to speak to emerging fields, must invent new journals to spread the word. To address the latter theme, CELJ invited Willis Regier, who directs the University of Illinois Press, to offer recommendations about the new and ongoing lives and liveliness – and, occasionally, deaths – of university press journals. To address the former, CELJ asked James English, professor of English and comparative literature and chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss ways in which even the most forward-looking of journals in the humanities, Postmodern Culture, which he co-edited with Lisa Brawley for five years, could profit by re-examining its claims to being innovative. Both keynotes, edited for publication in JSP, provide a valuable distillation of their authors’ scholarly and practical wisdom. [End Page 1] [End Page 2]

David C. Hanson

DAVID HANSON is editor of Nineteenth Century Studies, the interdisciplinary journal of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, and president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He is presently compiling an electronic edition, The Early Ruskin Manuscripts, 1826–1842, in association with the University of Lancaster Ruskin Programme and with NINES (the Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship), based at the University of Virginia.

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