Preface: The Material Conditions of Historians' Labor
The Journal of the Early Republic relies on all the people who devote their time and expertise to supporting the production of historical scholarship in diverse institutions-in archives and libraries, universities and museums, professional organizations and their conferences, and journals and presse...
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| Published in: | Journal of the early Republic 2022-12, Vol.42 (4), p.539-542 |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The Journal of the Early Republic relies on all the people who devote their time and expertise to supporting the production of historical scholarship in diverse institutions-in archives and libraries, universities and museums, professional organizations and their conferences, and journals and presses. This network is complex, yet at its core it takes for granted the existence of researchers with the time, resources, and incentive to produce new scholarship.As editors of an academic journal, we are deeply concerned that the crisis of the American university-the decline of tenure-line jobs and universities' eroding commitment to the humanities and social sciences-has created a structural crisis for scholarship. The broader crisis in the profession has a direct impact on the capacity of a journal like ours to publish new work. Since its inception, the JER, like most academic journals, has assumed that universities will subsidize the production of the journal by supporting faculty research that leads to article submissions, and by rewarding faculty who give time for peer review or to become editors.As Henry Reichman documents in his introductory essay to this forum, growing numbers of historians do not work in conditions that support or value their scholarship. We must continue to fight for the university, but this forum-out of necessity-recognizes that even as we engage in that struggle, we must find ways to support our colleagues and to build scholarly communities that are not reliant upon university funding or tenure lines as they have operated in the past. We have not chosen the path that led us to this point, but we can make choices about where we go from here. |
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| ISSN: | 0275-1275 1553-0620 1553-0620 |