NEQ is an interdisciplinary scholarly journal. Though essays should approach their topics historically, subjects can range broadly from literature to politics, art, economics, the environment, and so on, in any period or region of New England. In addition to traditional scholarly essays, we also accept submissions for special features including our Reconsiderations, Innovations in Teaching, New England Now, and Memoranda and Documents features. We also welcome proposals for special issues and forums.
Submitting Your Work to Us:
Please submit both a PDF and Word document of your essay along with a cover page to the editorial assistants at neq@umb.edu. The cover page should include your essay’s title, your name, and all contact information, including postal and email addresses. The first page of the essay on both the electronic and hard copy version should list its title but not your name or other identifying information. See below for further essay specifications and please read recent issues of the journal as you consider submitting to get a sense of the work we publish.
Evaluation Process:
The evaluation process generally takes from two to four months, however, where tenure and promotion calendars are in play, we make every effort to reach a decision within 60–90 days. We will inform you by e-mail of our decision. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, we will request that you send us an electronic version of the document formatted according to our stylistic requirements.
Reviews:
All reviews are commissioned by the editors, but we gratefully accept recommendations for both books to review and reviewers to write about them. In addition to reviews of scholarly books related to New England history and culture, we also publish review essays on relevant performances, exhibitions, digital and public history projects.
Essay Specifications:
1. Manuscripts should be prepared with one-inch margins in a standard font and size. All elements, including notes and extracts, should be double-spaced.
2. Full-length essays should be no longer than 12,000 words, including notes; pieces submitted for publication in one of our feature sections (Memoranda and Documents; Innovations in Teaching; or New England Now) should be much shorter.
3. Notes should appear at the bottom of the page of text (footnotes), numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals..
4. Essays submitted for consideration need not adhere to NEQ style, though we do prefer it. If your essay is accepted, you will be asked to revise it to accord with the Quarterly’s style for citations, a slight modification of that found in the Chicago Manual of Style. Please note that ibid. is not used. Any reference to a work previously cited should list the author’s last name, a short version of the title, and page number(s). Some examples:
- William Raymond Smith, History as Argument: Three Patriot Historians of the American Revolution (The Hague and Paris: Mouton & Co., 1966), 73-119.
- Smith, History as Argument, 27.
- David Levin, “Salem Witchcraft in Recent Fiction and Drama,” The New England Quarterly 28 (1955): 540.
- Steven W. Haycox, “Jeremy Belknap and Early American Nationalism: A Study in the Political and Theological Foundations of American Liberty” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1971).
- Henry Adams to Brook Adams, 18 February 1909, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
- Larzer Ziff, “The Literary Consequences of Puritanism,” in The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 39.
Please note some important points in the preceding examples:
- Information about a book should always include the name of the publisher.
- Information about an article in a journal should always include the volume number, year of publication, and relevant page number(s) in the form illustrated above.
- A location—city and state as well as institution—should be provided for an unpublished work.
5. Permissions of all kinds—for instance, permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts, permission to print illustrations, permission to quote beyond the limitations of fair usage—are the responsibility of the author.
6. We encourage authors to include images to accompany their essays. Art for reproduction should be supplied as TIFF or EPS files. Line art should be between 900 dpi (minimum) and 1200 dpi (maximum). For halftones, grayscale images should be between 260 (minimum) and 300 dpi (maximum).