Contemporaries CFP
Contemporaries invites guest editors to pitch us ideas for the clusters of the future. If you can think of a contemporary cultural artifact, text, or idea that inspires widespread fascination, curiosity, perplexity and feeling, you may also think of a short list of writers who you'd like to read on that subject. Pitch us!
Editor in Chief:
Gloria Fisk
Senior Editors:
Francisco Robles and Michael Docherty
Editor:
Tyler A. Tennant
Q: What makes a good subject for a cluster?
A: You know it when you see it, and you can't look away. Everybody you talk to has something to say about it, and each one says something different. Those conversations leave you thinking in new ways about matters of importance for contemporary culture writ large.
Q: What if you have an idea for a cluster, and you have a writer or two in mind, but you don't know how to proceed?
A: Pitch us! We can solicit writers, too, and we may also know some who share your interest in your subject. We can also work with you to develop a call for papers.
Q: What does a pitch involve?
A: For an initial pitch, describe your idea for the cluster in 150-200 words, and send that description to the editors at post45contemporaries@gmail.com. We'd also love to see a potential title for the cluster along with a list of possible participants (either people you've asked, or people you'd like to ask). Tell us also why Contemporaries is the best place for your theme. If you have a draft of a call for papers, we'd love to work with you on that, too.
Q: How does the editing process work?
A: After an idea is accepted as a cluster, the guest editor works with an editor at Contemporaries to refine it and assemble a list of writers. The guest editor communicates with the writers in the cluster to gather drafts of the essays and do a first round of edits. Then the guest editor passes the drafts on to our editor, who communicates with the writers about another round or two of edits. Our associate editor then uploads the submissions to the site and creates custom banner images for each piece. Then, we publish and we celebrate!
Q: How big is a Contemporaries cluster, generally, and how long is each essay?
A: Contemporaries publishes clusters and essays that vary significantly in their size and shape, but we like to keep them on the smaller side. We find that a cluster that has more than six to eight contributors tends to grow diffuse, and that lack of coherence prevents any of the pieces from getting the attention it deserves. An essay that is longer than 3000 words or so inclines to lose its readers, too. But these are generalities, and we're glad to discuss the variety of ways they might apply.
STUDENT PROTEST STATEMENTS
The editors of Contemporaries are also professors, and we saw how our students spent the spring of 2024: Advancing a clear moral vision for the future, where Palestinians can live in freedom and peace; the U.S. university system divests from perpetual war; and antisemitism has no place.
We love to see it — so we are dedicating this ongoing cluster to it.
This is an ongoing call for college students: Send us the statements, demands, and community guidelines that animate your collective protests.
We are looking for documents that speak in a single voice on behalf of a specific student group, with the aim to publish those documents exactly as they're written.
This call is motivated by our admiration for this student movement and our horror at its misrepresentation in our public sphere. By amplifying the voices of the protestors, we hope to represent the quality and diversity of the protests they extend across institutions public and private, in every region of the U.S.
In aggregate, we hope that these statements will help their readers answer questions like:
- How are contemporary college students connecting the dots between the tuition they pay to a corporatized university system and the ongoing violence in Gaza?
- What specific demands does this student movement make from the universities where it unfolds, and how do those demands vary from one institution to another?
- How does this movement work, logistically, to ensure the safety of the whole campus community?
- How does this protest movement combat the logics of antisemitism while it also protests the U.S.-funded militarization of the Israeli state?
Send your statement with the name and any relevant information about the group it represents to: post45contemporaries@gmail.com, subject line: Protest!
"Copyright Cultures"
Deadline: July 1, 2025
Co-editors:
Michael Menna, PhD Candidate, Stanford University
Luca Messarra, PhD Candidate, Stanford University
We are soliciting contributions for "Copyright Cultures," a forthcoming Contemporaries cluster to be published by Post45 this year. "Copyright Cultures" invites humanists, librarians, and lawyers to engage multifariously with copyright's diffuse impact on knowledge production and socio-cultural memory. We already have three essays in the late stages of revision and are looking to receive three more for the cluster. We look forward to reviewing any and all humanist interrogations of copyright law, and we will be particularly excited by proposals and essays that explore specific non-print media (sound, film, video games, etc.), as well as interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives. Essays might consider how copyright structures:
- The reception of a particular author or genre
- Canon, field, and identity formation
- Textual scholarship
- The accessibility and availability of particular cultural objects
- The effects of United States copyright law on global cultural circulation
Ultimately, our goal is to examine how copyright is more than a legal doctrine. We want to offer a variety of perspectives wrangling with how it controls what scholars read, write, and teach. Specifically, we want to showcase why scholars of textual interpretation are in a unique position to critically evaluate the regulatory ecosystem under which texts are composed, commercialized, and consumed. We need humanist methodologies to examine how today's copyright laws do and do not uphold the Constitution's promise to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," not least because they are best equipped to parse ideological constructs like “Progress,” “Science,” and “Art.”
Please send proposals for a 2-3,000 word essay — or essay drafts — to Michael Menna (mlmenna@stanford.edu) and Luca Messarra (messarra@stanford.edu) by July 1, 2025. Note that we are hoping to receive complete drafts by August 31, 2025 at the latest. Feel free to reach out to us both with any questions!