With this issue, the Journal of British Studies completes the editorial transition that started in September 2014, when a new editorial team took responsibility for journal policy and new submissions. Until 2019, the general editorial offices of the Journal of British Studies will be hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. I would like to thank the former editors, Brian Cowan and Elizabeth Elbourne at McGill University, for their collaboration during the transition period and for their work on a number of contributions that were initially developed under their editorship. The new book review editors, Amy Harris and Paul Westover of Brigham Young University, succeed Amy M. Froide and Gail Savage.
I am especially grateful to the exceptionally able editorial team supporting me: the Journal's first full-time assistant editor, Julie Hakim Azzam, the associate editors, and the members of the cross-disciplinary international board of advisors, all of whom are listed individually on the masthead. I look forward to continuing our joint work on behalf of the Journal over the next four years. I would further like to thank the University of Pittsburgh's Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, especially Dean N. John Cooper, for enabling us to host the Journal for this editorial cycle; the NACBS leadership, especially its immediate past president, Dane Kennedy, and president, Keith Wrightson, as well as the Council, for their confidence; and the editorial, production, and marketing teams at Cambridge University Press for their support throughout the transition.
Scholarly journals retain a pivotal role within a fast-changing publishing environment. They provide a highly visible forum where much original research first gets presented, a dimension that might expand further as the commitment of university presses to specialist monographic works contracts. Journals also tend to subject scholarship to more rigorous evaluation and criticism than do collections of essays or even monographs. Learned and professional societies, enterprising publishers upholding the traditions of scholarly excellence, and universities subsidizing editorial offices perform a valuable service to the scholarly community by underwriting the labor and sustaining the processes necessary to the dissemination of knowledge. Rigorous prepublication review relies on dedicated scholars volunteering their critical efforts, and I would like to thank the colleagues who have already reviewed or will be reading manuscripts for the Journal during this editorial cycle.
The new editor and associate editors of the Journal of British Studies, whose collective expertise ranges from the early medieval to the contemporary periods and covers a broad array of approaches to the political, social, economic, and cultural histories of the British Isles and Empire, are committed to an ecumenical conception of British Studies. We will continue to seek to balance premodern and modern coverage and encourage inquiry in changes and continuities across conventional chronological boundaries. We are keen to attract explorations in the history of the British Isles (including relations between regions and nations) and the British Empire that may be conceived in the broadest way chronologically, geographically, and thematically. We encourage contributions that put British experience in European, comparative, transnational, and global contexts. The Journal focuses primarily on historical studies, but we embrace cross- and interdisciplinary understandings of British Studies and welcome contributions from British Studies scholars in fields such as literature, history of art, musicology, geography, economics, and film studies. We especially encourage submissions in areas that have been underrepresented, in particular medieval history, including investigations that place English and British developments in European context and that explore British contacts with the wider world before early modern expansion.
While we will continue to reserve most space for research articles and book reviews, we are open to diverse formats on a case-by-case basis, especially with a view to generating debate about particular methodologies, interpretational issues, and broader disciplinary developments. Scholars wishing to propose a special forum, debate, viewpoint, or other format should write to the editor.
The new editorial team and I look forward to engaging with the exciting work undertaken across the full breadth of British Studies and to publishing the research of both established and emerging scholars.
