Index to American Quarterly Volume 55 March 2003 to December 2003

Over the past few months, the American Quarterly Associate Editors, the new Managing Board, and the national Advisory Board have had numerous conversations, in Los Angeles and at the ASA conference in Hartford, about the journal and its role within the field. A subtext to these conversations has been the underlying question: what is the role of academic journals in the twenty-first century? This question reflects not only the changes that have taken place in universities over the past few decades, as they have been increasingly privatized and corporatized in a complex marketplace--changes that include the wooing of academic stars and an emphasis on trade publication--but also the dramatic changes that digital technology and the Internet have produced in publishing, and the role of journals in establishing and defining areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, such as American studies, that are in a constant state of self-evaluation and redefinition.

Key to AQ's role within the field has been its publication of (blind) peer-reviewed essays. This kind of publication, as we are all well aware, is one of the foundations of traditional academic practice, one that forms a key element in how universities evaluate scholars for promotion. There are many aspects of the peer review process that are laudatory. In reviewing many of the reader reports for the journal, I have been impressed by the care, attention, and serious work that reviewers put into evaluating manuscripts and providing detailed and constructive criticism for authors. These reports are a testimony to the largely invisible and unrewarded labor that upholds a field such as American studies, work that is both generous yet demanding of scholarly rigor. The essays in this issue are testimony to scholarship that can thrive in a peer-reviewed context. They constitute rich and varied examples of important primary research: an analysis of the relationship of Emily Dickinson's work to the electro-magnetic telegraph, the socialist activism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a rethinking of U.S. border studies in relation to the novel Ramona, and the history of a women's coffeehouse in Minneapolis. As a group, these essays also demonstrate the extraordinarily diverse array of scholarship in American studies.

Yet, as is well known, the peer review system can also be stifling. The process is time-consuming, and can result in authors rewriting their essays numerous times only to be ultimately rejected by an editorial board that has not participated in the revision process; authors can be so daunted by the revisions demanded by readers that they give up. Reviewers and authors may be, for unintended reasons, a bad fit. Anonymity is key to the fairness of the process, but can also be a disguise that allows reviewers to be less generous in their evaluations. Many established scholars in any field often choose not to enter into the peer review process because of the time it takes and the obstacles it entails. Yet, in many ways, a field like American studies needs peer-review journals in order to both survey the range of interdisciplinary scholarship (no editor or group of editors could possibly be experts across a field of study as diverse as this one) and within the academic system to establish itself as worthy of academic and university support.

The editors and advisors of AQ have decided to begin to expand the kinds of writing that the journal publishes on a regular basis, to include interviews with scholars in the field as well as activists, artists, and cultural producers; short forums on key issues; and "think" pieces on timely issues in the field. Here, we are building on the work done by former Editor Lucy Maddox to include in the journal occasional forums from the ASA conference. These essays will be subject to editorial but not peer review, and many will be solicited by the editors for the journal. We also have decided to expand the review function of the journal beyond books and exhibitions to other media forms, such as film, television, and new media. We begin in...