Promoting Post45 Journal with an OLH Grant
Posted by Dr Paula Clemente Vega on 15 October 2024
Promoting Post45 Journal with an OLH Grant
The OLH Open Access Award 2023 awardee’s report: Post45 Journal
An Open Insights report by Post45 Journal co-editors Annie McClanahan, Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine, and Arthur Z. Wang, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication
Last year, Post45 Journal applied for an Open Library of Humanities (OLH) Open Access Award for seed funding for an article prize program for emerging and contingent scholars. We were delighted to receive this award and so grateful to OLH for their ongoing leadership and support for open access humanities publishing.
What is Post45?
Founded in 2011, Post45 Journal is the flagship peer-reviewed journal of Post45, a scholarly collective formed in 2006 to promote new, field-shaping work in contemporary American literary and cultural studies. In 2013, David Alworth wrote that “Post45” designates “a formidable institution dedicated to the study of American culture during the second half of the twentieth century and beyond…Its increasing influence is palpable, evident in the ordinary language of academic sociality. When people ask, ‘What do you work on?’ they know what you mean when you say ‘Post-45.’” [1] The organization’s other activities include an annual symposium and graduate symposium; Post45: Contemporaries, an online forum for clusters of short, accessible, and timely scholarly essays; Pod45 by Contemporaries, a podcast; a book series at Stanford University Press; and the Post45 Data Collective, an open-access repository of peer-reviewed literary data sets. Our papers have been acquired by Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.
As editors, we feel that Post45 Journal’s signature is its open access, online format. About to enter our fifteenth year, the journal is one of the oldest of the still too-small number of peer-reviewed open access journals in the humanities. Our online format allows us to avoid long publishing backlogs, and we release themed special issues and standalone articles on an irregular schedule to ensure reasonable publication timelines commensurate with the profession’s escalating demands on junior scholars in particular. Post45 Journal’s online format also allows articles to include film clips, audio, images, and other digital objects, a capacity we’ve taken advantage of in special issues on “Midcentury Design Cultures” (which included rare archival materials from the Chicago Film Archives) and “Editing American Literature” (which included manuscript pages, letters, and never-before-published photographs).
Post45 is a scholar-led organization unaffiliated with a university press or commercial publisher. Unlike most of our peer journals, Post45 Journal operates with zero income: we receive no revenue from subscriptions or ads; charge no membership dues or registration fees for our annual symposia; and earn no royalties for book sales in our Stanford University Press series. Our operating costs (website hosting and pay for graduate student editors) are sponsored by Emory University, and board members cover additional costs using their personal research funds.
What Project Did Our Award Support?
Post45 Journal used this award to launch two article prize competitions during the 2023–2024 academic year: one for early career scholars and one for contingent scholars. We hoped this prize competition would boost our profile and reputation as a leading literary studies journal and one of the United States’s few diamond open access humanities journals. We also wanted to use the prize to emphasize how our open access model expands the reach and accessibility of our publications and accelerates our schedule. Most importantly, we wanted to increase the diversity, quality, and volume of our submissions. We especially wanted to support and celebrate the crucial work of early-career scholars (current PhDs and those no more than five years post-PhD) and contingent and independent scholars.
We thus requested funds from OLH to help support two awards for the first year of the prize. Simultaneously, we raised funds from current and past Post45 board members, highlighting that the early-career scholar award would be named in honor of two-time Post45 Journal co-editor Mary Esteve, whose service as a board member, editor, and peer reviewer has been unparalleled. We were fortunate enough not only to win the OLH award but also to raise more funds than we expected from our generous board members, and were ultimately able to offer two awards for early-career scholars and one for contingent scholars.
What Were the Outcomes?
In fall 2023, we circulated a call for submissions with a January 2024 deadline. We hoped to receive 20−30 submissions, and we were thrilled beyond belief when we instead received a total of 80: 65 by early-career scholars and 15 by contingent scholars. Both co-editors read each submission and selected 22 finalists for our five-person prize committee, which included the two of us, our amazing managing editor Nia Judelson (Emory), and Post45 board members Sean McCann (Wesleyan) and Rachel Greenwald-Smith (St. Louis University). In March, our prize committee reviewed finalists’ essays and selected three winners and four honorable mentions. We also advanced three essays directly to peer review and wrote individual editorial notes for 17 other highly-ranked essays, encouraging the authors to revise and resubmit based on our feedback — several of which are now undergoing peer review. In April, we announced the winners and honorable mentions via our website, social media, and email list. Winners received $500 each and all honorees received books by Mary Esteve and Adrienne Brown from the Post45 series, courtesy of Stanford University Press, and a letterpress printed certificate. We will publish all seven honorees in a special prize issue of the journal in December 2024.
We feel that this project was an unqualified success—we are thrilled not only by the quantity of submissions but also by their quality: the selection committee members agreed that the decisions were some of the hardest professional judgments we’ve ever had to make. We were also blown away by the range and breadth of the work: our prize essays explore a 1955 novel by Pearl Buck and a 2021 novel by Alexandra Kleeman; the queer hip-hop-country of Lil Nas X, the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman, and elegies for dead musicians; the poetry of the Black Arts Movement and the poetics of feminist choice. It’s clear to us that the field of post-war American literary and cultural criticism is vibrant, and that a new generation of scholars and writers is pushing the field in compelling new directions!
[1] David J. Alworth, “Hip to Post45,” Contemporary Literature 53 no. 3 (2013): 622–623.