In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editors’ Note
  • Cynthia Patterson, Editor, Jean Lee Cole, Editor, and Eric Gardner, Review Editor

As we close out a year celebrating our 25th anniversary and look ahead to what we hope will be another productive 25 years, American Periodicals welcomes a new editorial team: Jean Lee Cole (Loyola University Maryland) will be joining Cynthia Patterson (University of South Florida) as Editor, and Eric Gardner (Saginaw Valley State University) is the journal’s new Review Editor. Our thanks to outgoing editorial team members Karen Roggenkamp and Craig Monk, who served with Cynthia for a five-year term, from 2010–2015.

Cynthia Patterson began her professional career as a journalist, and after two intervening careers in medical office management and fitness, completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at George Mason University in 2005. Her 2010 book Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s (University Press of Mississippi) examines the circulation of American art in five important Philadelphia magazines: Graham’s, Peterson’s, Godey’s, Sartain’s Union, and Miss Leslie’s.

Jean Lee Cole studies periodicals and visual culture of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, focusing on the recovery of cultural contributions by women and ethnic and racial minorities. Her publications include work on African American writers Julia C. Collins and Martin Delany, the early Asian American writer Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, and German American writer and editor Rudolph Block/Bruno Lessing, as well as several editions: The Collected Plays of Zora Neale Hurston (with Charles Mitchell; Rutgers University Press, 2008); Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner (West Virginia University Press, 2013); and A Japanese Nightingale and Madame Butterfly: Two Orientalist Texts (with Maureen Honey; Rutgers University Press, 2002).

Eric Gardner’s Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2009) won the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Award and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2010. His new book Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford 2015), written with the support of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, explores the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s weekly newspaper during and just after the Civil War. [End Page v]

With Volume 26, American Periodicals appears with a fresh new cover design. We are also excited to announce several new and reimagined features to the journal. The “From the Periodical Archives” feature, inaugurated by founding editor James Tanner, has been renamed “In the Archive.” This new title indicates a slightly different focus: while still attending to the recovery of individual periodicals and archival discoveries pertaining to periodical studies, we encourage submissions that demonstrate the pleasures of studying periodicals, raise methodological concerns regarding the use of archives in periodical research, and interrogate the idea of the archive itself. We encourage the inclusion of artifacts (illustrations, facsimile reproduction of periodicals) as well as analysis that encompasses the entirety of the periodical form: illustrations, advertisements, typography, and paratextual elements, for example.

This issue introduces a new “Forum” feature, where a group of contributors engages in a discussion of a subtopic or methodological aspect of periodical studies. Here, Ryan Cordell, Elizabeth Hopwood, Benjamin Fagan, Kim Gallon, Jeffrey Drouin, and Amanda Gailey address the implications of digital approaches to periodical studies, in terms of the opportunities and limitations of digitization, access to digital archives, tools, and methods. This Forum inaugurates a new direction for AP, including digital humanities approaches to periodical studies in addition to—and in counterpoint with—traditional approaches.

We also hope to offer an expanded and enhanced range of reviews. In addition to the traditional single-work reviews that readers of American Periodicals have always valued, we hope to add both longer review essays that dialogically consider multiple works on a single subject or in a single area and shorter reviews that offer pithy evaluations of select works and that will be collected in a “Brief Notice” section. We conceive of the term “book” broadly, and so will offer reviews of edited collections and new editions of primary texts in addition to traditional monographs. We are also interested in expanding the purview of the review section to include reviews...

pdf

Share