The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies is a fully open access peer-reviewed publication edited by graduate students at The University of Iowa that mixes traditional approaches and contemporary interventions in the interdisciplinary humanities and interpretive social sciences. This year’s issue will explore the boundaries that can challenge and facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship through an inquiry into margins, marginalia, and the marginalized. 

Benedict Anderson noted that “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined.” We encourage you to think broadly about the spaces that margins create, inhabit, and question, and how we can cross canonical borders to expand and reimagine our understanding of racial, gendered, socio-political, and environmental communities. We seek submissions that interrogate what has been mapped by the margins (as open spaces on the page), the communities that have been marginalized by the borders of the page, and the marginalia that gives readers an opportunity to comment on established structures in writing, analysis, and adaptation, in order to articulate a diverse range of responses to how we might reimagine from the margins.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Institutional margins and spaces, university, prison, etc.
• Spaces and margins impacted and/or exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic
• Practice of reimagining communities (positive and negative, material and immaterial): creating safe spaces, gerrymandering etc.
• Margins, marginalia, book studies, film studies, social sciences, manuscripts, book arts
• Margins and marginalia as explored in narrative studies, narratology
• Readership, methodologies of reading, characters/authors who are readers
• Environmental perspectives, ecocritical studies, geographical and imagined space
• Definitions of the canon and discussions of its ongoing influence

Paper must include a coversheet with the following:

a) author name

b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in the journal

c) contact information

d) paper title

Essays should be no longer than 9,000 words (including footnotes and bibliography), MLA format. Please keep discursive endnotes to a minimum. We will not read submissions that significantly deviate from these guidelines.

Papers should be submitted by April 22nd, 2022.

Accepted papers will be notified by April 29th, 2022. We acknowledge receipt and answer all papers submitted. If you do not receive a reply within a week, please resend your document. 

Please email all submissions to: ijcs@uiowa.edu

For further details about the journal and its submission and style policies, please visit: https://ir.uiowa.edu/ijcs/