Diacritics is currently accepting general submissions.
Diacritics welcomes submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers. We are especially interested in new work that engages creatively and rigorously with literary, philosophical, visual, filmic or cultural texts of any historical period. We continue to publish lengthy review essays, one of the staples of our journal from its early days. We understand the tremendous investment of time and energy that goes into an academic essay, as well as the anxieties that often accompany the anonymous peer review process. Accordingly, we do all we can to treat both you and your scholarship with respect. We respond promptly to queries and can often let you know where a submission stands in the many stages of peer review. We tend to publish long essays, and two of our four issues per year are special issues. This means that we reluctantly turn down far more essays than we accept, including many promising essays that may just need another round of revisions or are ready to be published in specialized journal.
We consider only original work that has not been previously published either in print or online. To be fair to all the scholars whom we enlist to evaluate essays, we only agree to evaluate submissions that are not under consideration elsewhere. We do occasionally publish translations of essays originally published in languages other than English. We also invite authors to send shorter, timely, non-peer-reviewed pieces to us for the Diacritics blog. Submissions for the Diacritics blog are reviewed internally and do not need to adhere to the guidelines for published articles.
Submission Guidelines
- Please include a brief abstract (no longer than 150 words), with keywords, on the first page of the manuscript.
- Articles typically run between 8,000 and 10,000 words. We aren’t able to consider submissions longer than 12,000 words.
- Prepare manuscripts in a 12-point font and double-space all text.
- Initial submissions are not required to conform to the Diacritics style guide, but they should employ a consistent citational format.
- Send submissions in Word or PDF format (PDF is preferred) as an email attachment to diacritics@cornell.edu. Include your mailing address or institutional affiliation in an email, but remove any self-identifying references from the text.
Review policy
All essays published in Diacritics have first gone through double anonymous peer review. We make every effort to ensure the anonymity of authors and referees and ask that authors remove all self-identifying references. The identity of the author is not revealed to referees, and the editors do not know the identity of the author until a decision has been reached.
Submissions are first read and ranked by an editorial board committee. Those essays chosen for outside review are sent to referees with the appropriate expertise. Submissions are evaluated by scholars around the world—referees need not have any affiliation with Cornell or the Diacritics editorial board. Authors of submissions that are not recommended for further evaluation will receive notification, which does not include formal reader reports, usually within six weeks.
Referees are not paid for their reports; they agree to evaluate essays on top of their own research, teaching, and professional obligations. We ask them to evaluate essays within six weeks, but sometimes they take far longer than we would like. We do not ask referees to complete any forms or to respond to particular categories such as “accept without revisions, “revise and resubmit” and so on. Many of our referees do offer substantive feedback on the essays they read. The final decision to accept or reject is left to our editorial board. We ask for your patience with the process, which usually takes from three to six months
After acceptance
When an essay is recommended for publication, we ask the author to make revisions that respond to the reader reports and to follow our style guide.