Editors' Note

With this issue, a new editorial team takes the helm of American Periodicals: Co-Editor Jean Lee Cole (Loyola University Maryland) will now serve as Editor, and Sarah Salter (Texas A&M-Corpus Christi) joins as Associate Editor. After aiding in the transition, Co-Editor Eric Gardner (Saginaw Valley State University) will return to his role as Review Editor and continue to provide advice and support. We would like to begin this new term by expressing our deep appreciation for the longtime and ongoing contributions of Cynthia Patterson (University of South Florida), who is stepping down from her role as Co-Editor of the journal after eight years. Cynthia diligently kept the submissions coming in, shepherded them through the review process, and helped Jean and Eric learn the ropes of the journal-editing business over the past three years, when we first came on board at AP. She also cultivated in us a commitment to early-career scholars, modeling hospitality, generosity, care, and patience throughout the editorial process. We—and so many AP authors and peer reviewers along the way—are deeply grateful to you, Cynthia.

Jean and Eric, with Cynthia, sought to broaden the scope of the journal, actively cultivating submissions on topics reaching back to the colonial period and forward to the present day. They also sought submissions from scholars working in black periodical studies, immigrant periodicals, Native and indigenous studies, and leftist and underground periodicals and subcultural movements, as well as work from scholars outside the traditional periodical-studies fields of literary studies and history. The doors of AP opened a bit wider to scholars inhabiting the fields of media studies, art history, and communications, as well as to practitioners—librarians, archivists, and collectors. These efforts did not necessarily constitute a new direction for the journal—indeed, attention to the margins of periodical production has always been part of American Periodicals—but rather, a concerted intention.

These efforts met with some success. Over the past three years AP has published multiple essays, features, and reviews regarding African American print culture as well as that of indigenous and immigrant populations. More than two thirds of contributors during that time (including reviews as well as essays and features, but excluding special issues) have been women. Through these ongoing efforts, we are confirming what contributors to a special issue of Legacy on Women in Black Print Culture Studies as well as contributors to a special issue of American Periodicals on Black periodical studies have shown: that periodicals have provided venues for marginalized populations to disseminate ideas and form alternative publics. Through our editorial practice, we are also hoping to show that the somewhat "niche" field of periodical studies can be a locus for critique and transformation, enriched by the variety of disciplines, practitioners, and methodologies that intersect there.

But change is slow. In her searing, simultaneous calling-out and call to action from 2013, "A Riff, A Call, and a Response: Reframing the Problem That Led to Our Being Tokens in Ethnic and Gender Studies; or, Where Are We Going Anyway and with Whom Will We Travel?," Pier Gabrielle Foreman recalled a question Barbara Christian once asked her back in the 1980s: "What does it mean if Black Studies thrive while Black people in the academy barely survive?" Foreman notes that since that call made thirty-odd years ago, Black Studies and other areas of ethnic studies have grown by leaps and bounds, while the actual presence of black scholars and scholars of color generally have, if anything, diminished. In other words, the diversification of academic fields of study has not seen a commensurate diversification of academe itself. Instead, the whiteness of academe, as Foreman describes it, has "reproduced itself with increasing frequency and with near fractal-like repetition."

We agree with Foreman that this generational replication will likely continue without "diligent, thoughtful, and affirmative" interventions on the part of conference organizers, hiring committees, acquisitions editors, and journal editors and reviewers to bring more diverse perspectives into the tent. To that end, we have committed to more inclusive approaches to acquisition, peer...