Book Review Editor Research Articles

Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History by Kyle Harper

Reviewed by: Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History by Kyle Harper Brandon T. McDonald Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History Kyle Harper Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 686. ISBN: 9780691192123 Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA's three Book Review Editors: Maria Doerfler (maria.doerfler@yale.edu); John Weisweiler (j.weisweiler@lmu.de); and Damián Fernández (dfernandez@niu.edu). We are inseparable from pathogens (at least, for much of our history). With good reason, this theme reverberates through the chapters of Kyle Harper's recent book, Plagues upon the Earth, a global history of disease stretching back to before our emergence as a species. We will call it a work of historical epidemiology. An ancient economic historian, Harper follows up his previous monograph, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton, 2017)—a considerable portion of which dealt with infectious disease—by expanding from Roman epidemiological events to a full history of humans' experience with pathogens. He delivers this history—a massive undertaking at nearly 700 pages—with a strong grasp of the science (particularly microbiology and phylogenetics) and an adeptness at making it accessible that is rarely reached in historical scholarship. A struggle to contend with the challenges in writing a global history of disease is somewhat apparent, given that our evidence (whether it be demographic or genomic) is unsurprisingly biased towards Europe. Harper, keenly aware of the difficulties, accepts them and provides as close to an aerial perspective of the human world's exposure to pathogens as possible, with caveats and without firmly extrapolating "Western" evidence. Plagues upon the Earth has four parts, each taking on a crucial aspect of our evolving relationship with germs, and these parts are divided into three chapters. Part One, "Fire," gives the reader an overview of the microbes that have afflicted Homo sapiens and our predecessors for hundreds to thousands of millennia. Harper familiarizes us with humans' most deadly and notorious disease culprits, such as species of bacteria and viruses, as well as less villainized microbes like protozoa and helminths, elucidating that those infecting early chimpanzees (our closest living ape relative) and Homo erectus (an ancestor of modern humans) in some cases evolved to adapt to us. He explains how our understanding of the emergence and evolution of pathogens has improved immensely with the advance of paleogenomics (ancient DNA analysis) and phylogenetics (the study of evolutionary development and the diversification of species), which he labels and continually refers to as "time travel" and "tree thinking," respectively—terms that are a bit playful but nonetheless descriptively effective for reaching a wider audience. These scientific methods, Harper rightly argues, afford us better comprehension of the germs that affected our ancestors and today allow us to write a better-informed history of disease. Early [End Page 238] on, the reader realizes that the improvements in science are a partial basis behind Plagues upon the Earth; perhaps a successor, or an enlightened reply, to works like William McNeil's Plagues and Peoples (Harmondsworth, 1976) or Jared Diamond's Gun, Germs, and Steel (New York, 1997), both of which are cited and referenced in the text multiple times. Ultimately, Part One serves to illustrate not only the ubiquity of microbes, both harmful and not, but also that they were already an age-old fixture on this planet long before Homo sapiens arose. Part Two, "Farms," delves into the diverse ecological settings our ancestors explored and settled into, as well as the significance of these migrations to pathogenic adaptation. Harper begins Part Two with an intriguing story about William Black, an eighteenth-century London doctor who embarked on the huge research task of attempting to understand the main reasons humans die (A Comparative View of the Mortality of the Human Species at All Ages; and the Diseases and Casualties by which They Are Destroyed or Annoyed, London, 1788). These anecdotes are sprinkled throughout the book, usually at the beginning of sections. In the Fate of Rome, Harper strayed from his place as a strictly...

Stages of Hope

Stages of Hope

A Happy Farewell

A Happy Farewell JCMS In Summer 2018, we introduced ourselves as the new editorial team behind Cinema Journal by issuing a demand—and a promise—to decolonize the journal, the field, and the way the journal constituted the field. By its next issue, Cinema Journal had become the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). That name change was itself a pledge to become a new kind of journal. It was the first of many transformations we initiated in pursuit of greater equity and inclusion in academic publishing and film and media studies, broadly construed. We all devoted years of our lives to this project, because we believed and believe that the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' (SCMS) journal of record must reflect its membership's personal and disciplinary diversity and that the best way to express our love for cinema and media studies is by "constantly calling into question received ideas about that field and embracing new voices and concepts."1 So much has changed about Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The cover of Cinema Journal 57, no. 4. Cover art by Scott Richmond. [End Page 1] the journal since the Summer 2018 issue that we felt it incumbent upon us to reflect briefly on those changes—and the future transformations they anticipate—as we joyfully hand JCMS over to its new editors. To develop an editorial agenda organized around professional equity and respect for diversity, we demanded recognition of an unfortunate and uncomfortable truth: "many of our fellow [SCMS] members do not feel recognized by SCMS or its journal."2 As the publication of a learned society, JCMS belongs to the SCMS membership—period. Its area of inquiry is whatever film and media studies means to them—period. And if members feel that the journal is inhospitable to their subfield, then the journal needs to change—period. We recognized that we as editors not only needed to reach out to members of historically underrepresented groups and fields; we needed to apologize and hold ourselves accountable for the journal's past exclusionary practices. Consequently, we changed the journal's review procedures to include revision and resubmission so we could work with authors on developing their ideas for publication. We implemented new submissions management software to accelerate the review process. We separated book reviews from the In Focus topics in order to prioritize books by precariously employed scholars and scholars from underrepresented groups, showcase books from less industrially prominent presses, and promote important new titles in a timely fashion. Book Review Editor Laura Isabel Serna worked hard to spread the service of reviewing and ensure that senior scholars as well as junior scholars and graduate students lent their insights to this important endeavor. We also made our book reviews open access, so that more scholars could benefit from our reviewers' insights. We added two Co-editors of Outreach and Equity, who spearheaded the JCMS Publishing Initiative and a Facilitated Peer Review process to pair minority scholars with senior mentors prior to submission to help them prepare their work for publication. The Co-editors of Outreach and Equity also commissioned a study of the journal's publication record over the past twenty years.3 Led by digital humanities scholars Yelana Sims and Nina Lorenz—with contributions from all seven SCMS caucuses—this study documents the journal's long-standing biases and establishes a foundation for further accountability and transparency. Frankly, it doesn't make us look very good, which was precisely the point. We needed to own our shortcomings so we could do better. We also felt compelled to improve the accessibility of the journal—and indeed the society it represents—for film and media studies scholars around the globe. We switched publishers in order to pursue a digital-forward publishing model that would make JCMSjournal.org the locus for all our paywalled and open access content while also preserving quarterly print issues for those who choose to receive them. On our website, we launched [End Page 2] an annual Fifth Issue of peer-reviewed research articles featuring work by authors who either chose or were compelled by funding structures to publish open access. (Prior to...

A Selective Bibliography on Fashion in American Culture

Below is a selective, representative bibliography of resources, which contains books and journal articles on Fashion in American Culture. Also included are some online resources that are integral to the study of Fashion. These magazines (Business of Fashion and Women's Wear Daily), journals (Fashion Practice and Fashion Theory), and online research platform (Bloomsbury Fashion Central) all require a paid subscription for access. Camille McCutcheon is a library faculty member at the University of South Carolina Upstate Library in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She holds a Joint Master's Degree in English and Library and Information Science from the University of South Carolina. She is a Journal of American Culture Editorial Board member and a former book review editor for the Journal. She also is a former Popular Culture Association (PCA) Governing Board member. Bloomsbury Fashion Central – https://www.bloomsburyfashioncentral.com/ Business of Fashion – BusinessofFashion.com Fashion Practice – https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rffp20/current Fashion Theory – https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rfft20 Women's Wear Daily – WWD.com

Introduction

With the publication of this issue, 23-1, we are deeply honored to become the fifth editorial team for Global Environmental Politics. We are excited to keep building on the strong foundation laid by previous editors, including most recently Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann, and Erika Weinthal. As a result of the enduring commitments of all previous editorial teams—together with the high-quality research and writing by all authors published in these pages, and the often unseen but necessary and much appreciated work by countless reviewers over the past two decades—the journal’s impact factor reached 4.145 for 2021. A truly collective effort, Global Environmental Politics continues to be the premier academic home for research on issues related to global environmental politics and governance.Our many years of experience as associate editors of Global Environmental Politics have given us a head start on our new roles, but we are grateful that we have been able to rely on the support of Erika, Matt, and Steven, alongside the invaluable work by Susan Altman as managing editor, to smooth the transition. Joanna Lewis kindly agreed to stay on as an associate editor, and we are happy to have brought in Mark Axelrod, Kate Neville, and Yixian Sun as new associate editors. We also want to thank Beth DeSombre, who has given much time and service to the journal as the book review editor. Last but certainly not least, we greatly value the service and guidance of the GEP Editorial Board.Scholarship on global environmental politics has always benefited from the application of interdisciplinary perspectives using a multitude of methodological approaches, but the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion is increasingly recognized by researchers as well as policymakers, stakeholders, and activists. As editors, we will seek to further enhance the pluralism of articles published in Global Environmental Politics along multiple dimensions—including issue areas, geographical scope, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks—while maintaining a core focus on advancing theory through rigorous empirical work. This includes keeping up with new approaches to collecting and analyzing qualitative data as well as rapidly advancing trends in network analysis, statistics, and quantitative content analysis. To this end, we will continue to publish research notes, as instituted by Erika, Matt, and Steven. Alongside the research articles and forum articles, research notes bring new methods and datasets to the attention of readers and help broaden methodological horizons.Diversifying our pool of authors and readers remains a critical, albeit sometimes challenging, task for all of us who are involved in the editorial work. Important progress was made by our predecessors, but we believe that there is still room to continue to improve representation among our authors, our readership, and our editorial board. We are planning a number of activities to expand the geographical and disciplinary scope of the journal, including reaching out to scholars from all over the world to find out what they want from us. We will then use their feedback to develop programs intended to expand access and inclusion. This may involve a greater use of online tools and virtual events that can foster community building across long distances, as well as working with MIT Press with the goal of having more open-access articles.As quickly as scholarship is evolving, the world is changing faster. We are living in times that can be both exhilarating and frightening. Global Environmental Politics is deeply rooted in rigorous academic traditions, but there is room to foster new thinking and ideas. This is why we are also committed to mentoring junior scholars as well as scholars from under-represented groups, to ensure that they can successfully add their voices to our collective conversation by publishing in the journal. It is also why we value our many thoughtful and supportive reviewers for shepherding the work of early-career scholars through to publication and providing feedback that will help these scholars succeed with future submissions. It is a supportive scholarly community that allows Global Environmental Politics to thrive, and we are committed to maintaining that spirit of cooperation along with our standards of excellence for the journal.Finally, we would like to thank everyone for their tireless work in writing and reviewing during the worst of the global pandemic. We are committed to resuming outreach by the journal and working actively on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We remain open to new ways of working to the betterment of our community.

Editor’s Corner

Editor’s Corner

A Letter from the Editors-in-Chief

A Letter from the Editors-in-Chief

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Nancy Baker Jones, Editor and Nancy Elizabeth Baker, Editor The new year is often an occasion for change and transition, and so it is at the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. With this issue, Nancy Baker Jones ends her editorship of the book reviews. She has held the post since the July 2016 issue, the beginning of the journal’s 120th volume. Her tenure has been marked by consistency, quality, and coverage of a more diverse assortment of books than had been the norm for our publication. One notable innovation Dr. Jones oversaw in her tenure was the review essay, which we began publishing in January 2021. Thank you, Nancy, for your exemplary service to the Quarterly. We welcome Nancy Elizabeth Baker as our new book review editor. Dr. Baker is associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University (SHSU). She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University, and her research is on the history of gender, politics, and reform, focusing particularly on feminism and anti-feminism in the United States. Among her publications is the article “Hermine Tobolowsky: A Feminist’s Fight for Equal Rights,” which appeared in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (University of Georgia Press, 2015), edited Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless. The collection won the 2016 Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women. Dr. Baker won SHSU’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015, and she is on the editorial board for the University of Oklahoma Press’s Women and the American West series. Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note Francis Allard, Bérénice Bellina-Pryce, Julie Field, and Cristina Cobo Castillo Welcome to the latest issue of Asian Perspectives. As always, the journal remains committed to publishing high-quality research articles whose chronological and regional scope reflects its broad readership across East, South, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. You will note that several articles in this issue focus on the identification and interpretation of specific materials and technologies. The topics covered by four of the articles include rock art in early Mongolia, bone tools in prehistoric eastern China, metallurgy at the Han empire’s southern periphery, and plant remains and parasite microfossils in pre-contact New Zealand. A fifth article relies on settlement pattern and demographic data from Neolithic and Bronze Age China to draw insightful comparisons between the developmental trajectories of two distant regions. Also included in this issue are three book reviews: one on landscape, nature and historical imagination on the Indian subcontinent (by Pratik Chakrabarti, reviewed by John Lukacs), one on animal classification systems in ancient China (by Ningning Dong, reviewed by You Yue), and a third on the site of Non Ban Jak in Thailand (edited by C.F.W. Higham and A. Kijngam, reviewed by Carmen Sarjeant). We take this opportunity to welcome Cristina Castillo as the journal’s new Book Review Editor (contact apjabre@hawaii.edu) and thank Michèle Demandt for serving as the first editor dedicated to this important section of the journal. Michèle streamlined many of the editorial procedures for the book reviews. We wish her the best in all her future professional and personal endeavors. As mentioned in the previous issue, the Editors and University of Hawai‘i Press recognize the pressures faced by scholars to publish their manuscripts in the shortest time possible. As a way to address this, the journal has begun making “Early Release Articles” (ERAs) available on Project MUSE while manuscripts are still in press. Authors can now expect to see their manuscripts published as (uncopyedited) preprints within a few months of full acceptance instead of having to wait six to nine months for publication of the entire print issue. As a final note, the Editors look forward to meeting many of you at annual international and regional conferences, as well as smaller seminars, where we will be happy to discuss with interested scholars the possibility of publishing their research in Asian Perspectives. Meanwhile, feel free to contact the Editors at apjaeds@hawaii.edu with any inquiries regarding the requirements and timing of the editorial process. [End Page 219] Copyright © 2023 University of Hawai‘i Press

Video Editorial: Anatomy of a Book Review: Why We Write, Why We Read Video

Book reviews have long been a staple of the scholarly conversation. Reviews connect researchers to recent publications, expand the audience for individual titles, and shape the boundaries of what counts as part of the library and information studies literature. At the same time, reviews can reinforce traditional academic hierarchies, particularly in terms of what books are reviewed and who is invited to render their opinion. Outgoing C&RL book review editor Emily Drabinski and a group of recent reviewers discussed the state of the academic book review in this lively conversation from January 20, 2023. Emily Drabinski, City University of New York Kaia MacLeod, University of Calgary Mallary Rawls, Florida State University Ashley Michelle Roach, Memphis University Charlotte Roh, California Digital Library Lynne Stahl, Wesleyan University Darren Sweeper, Montclair State University Anders Tobiason, Boise State University View the recording of the Anatomy of a Book Review: Why We Write, Why We Read webcast on the ACRL YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/iCIAEFPNkrM .

Editor’s Column: Summoning the “Honest Spirit” of John Steinbeck: Back to Ireland

Editor’s Column: Summoning the “Honest Spirit” of John Steinbeck: Back to Ireland

News, Equity Action Plan, In Memoriam

News, Equity Action Plan, In Memoriam

Call for Submissions

Research Article| December 01 2022 Call for Submissions Hungarian Studies Review (2022) 49 (2): 296–300. https://doi.org/10.5325/hungarianstud.49.2.0296 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Call for Submissions. Hungarian Studies Review 1 December 2022; 49 (2): 296–300. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/hungarianstud.49.2.0296 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressHungarian Studies Review Search Advanced Search The editors of Hungarian Studies Review are seeking proposals and submissions for the following types of manuscripts:The editors of HSR also welcome submissions beyond those outlined above, including project and conference reports, polemical scholarly debates, pedagogical discussions, and photo essays (subject to permissions). We also welcome proposals for special thematic issues.The journal provides copy-editing assistance to contributors, though we will return submissions to authors prior to consideration for publication if significant revisions are necessary. Please consult the Style Guide on the HSR webpage (https://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_HSR.html) —click on “Submissions” and then on “Style Guide”) for details on how to format your submission.Send all proposals and inquiries to our managing editor, Leslie Waters: lwaters@utep.edu.Send all suggestions for books to review to the book review editor, Szabolcs László: szlaszlo@iu.edu. You do not currently have access to this content.

Songs in the Key of Life

Songs in the Key of Life

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Pages of Sociological Imagination

A brief reflection of the past five years as Book Review Editor of Contexts and a list of books that spark editorial team members’ sociological imaginations.

Contributors

Sunil Agnani, associate professor in English and history at the University of Illinois Chicago, is the author of a book on Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (recipient of the 2014 Harry Levin Prize for Best First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association), which examines the role of ressentiment and revenge in European anticolonial thought of the Enlightenment.Jason Fitzgerald is assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he specializes in theater studies and post-1945 US cultural history. He is currently working on a book about the late 1960s US theatrical avant-garde, with an essay from that project published in Modern Drama. He was formerly the book review editor for Theatre Journal and is an assistant editor at boundary 2.Joshua Lam is assistant professor of English at Michigan State University. His research focuses on race, science, and technology in US literature. His current book project examines racialized automaton figures in the modernist era; a second project focuses on racial objectification in contemporary experimental Black poetry. His essays have appeared in the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Journal of Modern Literature, College Literature, Callaloo, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, and The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century.Robert D. Richardson is the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006).

Thank you to the reviewers of the 2022 Ornithological Applications, volume 124

I am grateful to those of you who found time to review manuscripts for Ornithological Applications in 2022. Even as the pandemic ebbed, we all had numerous challenges and demands on our time yet we were still able to publish our journal and contribute to society’s knowledge about how to conserve and manage birds. A rigorous and fair peer review process anchors our success, our scientific integrity, and our ability to inform one of the key challenges of our era, the loss of biodiversity. For volume 124, the list of reviewers includes 142 generous colleagues. I am especially grateful to individuals identified with asterisks; they reviewed two, or even three manuscripts. On behalf of Ornithological Applications, I thank all of them for their timely and conscientious work. Managing reviewers is mostly the job of our dedicated associate editors, whose names appear on the journal’s masthead. They too, along with our senior editors, the In Memoriam and Book Review editors, and the tireless professional staff at the AOS Publications Office, dealt with personal and professional challenges related to the pandemic but still managed to perform the work for the journal we collectively produce. Many and sincere thanks to all.

About the Authors

About the Authors

From the Book and New Media Review Editor's Desk

From the Book and New Media Review Editor's Desk