Editor's Update: Transitions.

Abstract

Editor’s Update: Transitions Anne Hudson Jones The past year has been a time of important transitions for Literature and Medicine, with changes in both ownership and editorship. Successful completion of the transfer of ownership hinged on successful completion of the search for a new editor. Thus, it is a double pleasure to announce that ownership of the journal has been transferred from the Institute for the Medical Humanities (IMH) of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston to Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) and that our new editor is Michael Blackie, at the College of Medicine of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Both are already well known to our readers: JHUP has been publishing the journal since 1985 (volume 4), and Michael Blackie has been book review editor and a member of the editorial board since 2013. The future of the journal is in good hands. As the journal leaves Galveston and I near the end of my interim term as executive editor, a brief historical reflection seems in order. Literature and Medicine’s six founding co-editors were Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, myself, William Claire, Peter W. Graham, Joanne Trautmann Banks, and D. Heyward Brock.1 We first came together at the annual meetings of the Society for Health and Human Values in 1980 and 1981 to discuss the need for such a scholarly journal, and we soon learned that starting a new journal with no institution or professional society to support it was not easy. Rabuzzi, with the help of Leslie A. Fiedler and Claire, persuaded the State University of New York Press to give us a try, and she became the journal’s first editor (1982–1984) as we published our first three annual volumes. We then approached Marie Hansen, director of the JHUP Journals Division at that time, who received approval from her board to begin publishing the journal if a sponsor could be found to guarantee financial support for any losses or special costs. Ronald A. Carson, then director of UTMB’s IMH, agreed to do so. Accordingly, the IMH assumed ownership of the journal, and I became the editor (1985–1993). [End Page 245] In its first ten years, the journal appeared as a hardcover annual; it began semiannual publication in its eleventh volume (1992), publishing one thematic issue and one general issue each year. The next change of editorship took place in 1994, when Suzanne Poirier at the College of Medicine of the University of Illinois at Chicago became editor (1994–2000). She was followed by co-editors Rita Charon and Maura Spiegel at Columbia University (2001–2006) and then by Charles Anderson at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (2007–2012). Charon stepped in as interim editor in late 2012 to assure a smooth transition before Catherine Belling at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine became the journal’s most recent editor (2013–2018). Each editor brought new energy and perspectives to the journal, and it has evolved over the years as the field of literature and medicine extended its intellectual and pedagogical reach in this country and abroad, in schools of medicine, nursing, and health-related professions, as well as in undergraduate and graduate programs. Many others have helped along the way, and many who helped have passed on during these thirty-eight years, leaving us as beneficiaries of their efforts in support of the journal. I miss them and remember them all with gratitude. On behalf of us all, I want to thank Catherine Belling, who came to the editorship at a difficult time in the life of the journal and made it thrive. Never has the journal been more robust than as she hands it off to her successor and moves on to the next stage of her remarkable career. I also want to thank Anna Fenton-Hathaway, who has stayed on as managing editor during this transition year. Her exemplary commitment to the journal and her skillful management of its submissions, reviewing, and production processes have been invaluable. And I look forward to the next phase of the journal’s life with our wonderful new editor Michael Blackie at the helm. He will do...