Editor’s Note

I am pleased to present my first issue as editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality. It is with enormous pride and some degree of humble awe that I begin my engagement with the impressive and diverse group of scholars who have made this journal an irreplaceable contribution to our field. This sentiment leads me to first thank Matt Kuefler, who did the early stages of editorial work on this issue and who has helped me to learn the ropes with collegial warmth and enviable efficiency. My first goal is to live up to his example of editorial excellence, and I think that the mere fact that a medievalist has handed off the reins to a twentieth-century specialist is indicative of the breadth and value of our enterprise. I am particularly grateful for the length of time he has been willing to overlap with me and for his continued efforts to complete editorial processes begun under his editorship. Please join me in thanking Matt for his stellar service. Just as he followed in the footsteps of editors past (John Fout, William N. Bonds, and Barbara Loomis), I intend to uphold the scholarly standards of this journal and maintain the practice of drawing on the very best historical scholarship on all aspects of sexuality from across the globe.

I would also like to thank the various people who are making this editorship possible. Both the chair of the Department of History, Hendrik Kraay, and the dean of the Faculty of Arts, Richard Sigurdson, at the University of Calgary were supportive of my plans from the beginning. The Faculty of Arts has supplied me with guaranteed funding and office space, and the Department of History will be making do with fewer teaching hours. My PhD student, Mikkel Dack, is providing me with invaluable assistance in getting our operation up and running. I am also grateful to Sue Hausmann and Stacey Salling from the University of Texas Press for their patience during these months of transition and to the provost of the University of Calgary, Dru Marshall, for her support of my contract with the press. Finally, I am grateful to two fellow journal editors, Andrew Port and Kenneth Ledford, for their advice and mentorship.

Future editor’s notes will elaborate on a few changes that I might make to the structure of the journal. For now, the only major change is the discontinuation of our “Dissertations Recently Completed in Related Fields” feature. This list depended almost exclusively on the volunteer efforts of Jonathon Erlen at the University of Pittsburgh. When we found out that Dr. Erlen could no longer do this work, Matt and I discussed it with our editorial board and decided that it would not be worthwhile to look for a replacement. The scholarly world has become an increasingly digitized place, and we feel that this information is now much more readily available. We would like to offer our sincere thanks to Dr. Erlen for his years of service to the journal. Another upcoming change that will be less immediately apparent to readers is that I am currently working on moving the administration of the journal to the online journal management system OJS: Open Journal Systems. This is software developed by Stanford University and Simon Fraser University in Canada to manage and distribute journals. I will only be deploying the management side of the system: Our issues will continue to be made available through Texas Press Journals Online, JSTOR, and Project MUSE. But future authors and reviewers will be asked to register as OJS users and upload submissions and reviews through that system. I fear that I am not as good at organizing paper as Matt is, so I hope that this digital help will keep our turnaround times fast and our responses to your queries efficient. Please send your feedback about this system and any other concerns you have about the journal to jhs@ucalgary.ca.

A final happy bit of news: Both Matt and I would like to congratulate Donna Drucker for winning the Maurice Daumas Prize from the International Committee for the History of Technology. Prof...