An Accidental Editorship

I arrived at the James Joyce Quarterly in 2001 by accident—literally. The year before, I had applied for a job at the University of Tulsa in “Modernism” and been politely rejected. The next year, however, a new job advertisement appeared: an open-rank appointment for the editorship of the JJQ—one of the most distinguished academic journals in the suddenly booming field of modernist studies. It also happened to be the journal that had just (again politely) declined to publish a piece I’d written on Joyce and snobbery. I asked my trusted dissertation director if I should apply for this new job, and he said “no”—if they wanted me they would have hired me. That seemed like good advice, but amid the now somewhat quaint process of printing cover letters, ordering dossiers, and stuffing envelopes, I ended up with one extra application packet. Rather than throw it away, I wrote out a Tulsa address and dropped it in the mail. A few months later, the black box of the job search opened, and the department chair called to say that they were considering an interview, but were unsure since many people remembered me from the previous year. That seemed like another way of saying—again, very politely—“thanks but no thanks,” so I was surprised again when an interview was scheduled late in evening at the MLA convention.

The interview must have gone well, though it took place so late at the end of a hectic day that I have absolutely no memory of it beyond my wife finding me in the lobby, tactfully announcing “you look awful,” and leading me to a shop where we spent a scandalous amount of money on a small sandwich and a cup of coffee. I had submitted a writing sample, of course, and eventually the committee asked to see the entire manuscript for my first book before inviting me to campus to give a talk. There was only one catch: I couldn’t deliver a talk on any of the material they had already seen. So with less than two weeks, and in a querulous state of disbelief, I managed to produce the not very subtly titled talk “Hating Joyce Properly.” I can’t imagine why I thought this a good idea at the time. Maybe titles like “Don’t Hire Me” or “Who Are You To Judge Me?” seemed too subtle. Having nevertheless written this passively aggressive lecture, I then finished my preparations for what would be a three day campus-visit marathon by getting desperately sick. As with my interview, I have almost no memory of delivering the talk aside from trying not to throw up on a podium that seemed to be subtly but insistently spinning. I do, however, recall learning at a reception afterward that Jameson’s and ibuprofen have only a very short-lived restorative effect.

Such is the accident that led me to the editorial chair at the JJQ. My arrival was greeted with some surprise among the Joyce community, though as Bob Spoo notes earlier in this issue, the journal nurtures a tradition of favoring the dark-horse candidates—perhaps out of an over-enthusiastic sense of commitment to this motif in Ulysses. The mission, however, seemed perfectly clear to me: bring the journal quickly into the digital age. We initially began to do this work ourselves and set about scanning the first several volumes. In the end, however, we decided to join Project MUSE, and since 2007 our current issues have been available through this forum. Currently, we average between 22,000 and 25,000 article downloads each year—a truly extraordinary figure considering that only a few years’ worth of issues are available. Our entire run of back issues is also available through JSTOR, which means the entirety of the JJQ is now online. This transition has not only vastly increased our readership, but last year for the first time our revenues from these digital services outpaced our print revenues. The JJQ thus remains in a strong financial position, even at a time when academic publishing as a whole finds...