Call for Papers:
Animal History - Inaugural Volume
Submissions open: September 15, 2023
The editors of Animal History invite article submissions for its inaugural volume, to be published in 2025.
Animal History is a new, peer-reviewed journal for histories of animals and human-animal relationships. The journal seeks to cultivate and publish cutting-edge historical research and to redress a long-standing gap in historical scholarship, which has traditionally focused on creating a record of human agency narrated through human-centered assumptions. Instead, Animal History seeks research documenting both the impact that humans have had on animals and the impact that animals have had on human histories, cultures, languages, technologies, environments, and lives.
We seek research on all time periods from the late Paleolithic to the early twenty-first century. Article manuscripts may focus on any geographic region, time period, or species, although we are especially interested in studies concerning peoples of color, indigenous peoples, rural and working-class populations, marginalized communities, and less familiar but important species (from worms and centipedes, to antelope, lizards, clams, and bitterns). We seek to publish rigorous historical work, reading primary sources and material culture against the grain to recover
nonhuman lives excluded, ignored, and erased.
Animal History recognizes the varied forms taken by scholarship in the fields of history and animal studies, and the journal welcomes interdisciplinary work as well as scholarship presented through new or creative formats. However, all submissions must be situated in the past and use historical methods, broadly defined, to be considered for publication.
We also invite reflective pieces exploring methodological and theoretical approaches to researching and writing animal history. And, since the study of historical animals and human-animal relationships is a relatively new field (circa thirty years), Animal History also invites viewpoint and comment contributions that seek to push the field in new directions or hash out current professional debates.
Article manuscripts should be original, unpublished, and should proceed beyond the presentation of materials or mere reporting on the content of historical primary sources. Manuscripts should offer original interpretations and draw new scholarly conclusions, while remaining contextualized within the scope of a given historical period or historiographical literature and engaging with current scholarly debates or conversations. Manuscripts should also avoid unnecessary jargon and be accessible to readers from disciplines outside history, including those in the social and animal sciences.
Submissions must be submitted via our manuscript system [https://animalhistory.scholasticahq.com] and should be no more than 9,100 words, including all references. However, we strongly prefer manuscripts of 8,000 words or less. Please also provide a summary of no more than 150 words, plus a list of four or five key words. Regarding queries and article ideas/proposals, please contact us at: animalhistory@udayton.edu
We do not accept pre-written book reviews. However, if you are an author or publisher of a new animal history book and would like to discuss possibilities of reviews, contact our book review editors:
Innocent Dande, dandeinnocent@gmail.com (For books focused on the Majority World.)
Jadon Nisly-Goretzki, nislygoretzki@uni-kassel.de (For books focused on Europe and North America.)
Submissions open: September 15, 2023
For submission guidelines and other important information for authors, please see our website with the University
of California Press.