Affiliated Groups | Journals

Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that began at ISU in 2008. Scholars and educators of eighteenth-century culture share new on the period through essays, notes, multimodal webtexts, and reviews. This cultural studies journal focuses on the works of early eighteenth-century author Daniel Defoe, perhaps most well known as the author of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe but also an innovator of the novel, prolific poet, political pamphleteer, and even secret agent. The journal also welcomes submissions on any author or aspect of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century culture.

Digital Defoe strives to meet four goals: to raise the bar for online educational content in history and literary studies with high quality, peer-reviewed, free access scholarly work; to bring student voices into the conversation with experts in the field; to emphasize the multicultural, global interests at stake in studying this period; and to provide a place to showcase as well as critique multimodal scholarship in the field. The journal accepts textual articles as well as multimodal material for its themed and open issues

Learn more about Digital Defoe
Contact Dr. Katherine Ellison

Euphemism is an online literary journal edited by undergraduate students at Illinois State University. They accept innovative poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and experimental forms from ISU students and from any and all writers who send submissions.

For more information, visit the Euphemism website
Contact Jeremy Hurley (Euphemism Advisor)

Feral Feminisms takes the feral as a provocative call to untaming, queering, and radicalizing feminist thought and practice today. Feral Feminisms is an independent, inter-media, peer reviewed, open access online journal. It is a space for students and scholars, artists and activists, to engage with the many sites and problematics of feminist studies – as understood broadly and across disciplines, genres, methods, politics, times, and contexts. Each issue of Feral Feminisms builds around a particular thematic, compiling diverse creative, queer, and always feral responses to the calls for papers. Feral Feminisms is part of the Radical Open Access Collective. a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses committed to horizontal alliances and creative experimentation.

Learn more about Feral Feminisms

Founded in Illinois as The Spoon River Quarterly and in continuous publication since 1976, SRPR is a volunteer-based poetry journal affiliated with the Publications Unit at Illinois State University in Normal, IL and operated by the Spoon River Poetry Association, a recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Each issue publishes new poetry in English and in translation, includes a chapbook-length SRPR Illinois Poet feature and interview, and Poetry for All, a feature in partnership with the Poetry for All podcast that closely examines notable poems new and old to provide readers and listeners alike with unique insight into how poems work their particular magic. SRPR is committed to the values of promoting poetry, building community, and leaving a lasting legacy

For more information, please visit SRPR's website

Obsidian cultivates, through publication and critical inquiry, Black imagination, innovation, and excellence—supporting Black, African, and African Diaspora creatives globally. Obsidian celebrates nearly fifty years of continuous publication and is dedicated to publishing contemporary poetry, fiction, drama/performance, visual and media art biannually in print and year round online.

Since its inception, Obsidian has featured a range of acclaimed writers, artists, and critics including Elizabeth Alexander, Houston A. Baker, Sharon Bridgforth, Octavia Butler, Wanda Coleman, Thadious Davis, Melvin Dixon, Gerald Early, Victor Ehikhamenor, C.S. Giscombe, Terrance Hayes, Essex Hemphill, Davida Ingram, Gayl Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Delita Martin, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Sharon Norwood, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Brenda Marie Osbey, Claudia Rankine, Stacey Robinson, Jerry Ward, and Gloria Wade Gayles, among others.

Supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Publications Unit in the Department of English at Illinois State University, a body corporate and politic of the State of Illinois and a 501(c)(3) organization. Founded in 1975 and recognized for editorial achievement by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and the Illinois Arts Council Agency, Obsidian’s full archive is available through JSTOR.

For more information, visit the Obsidian website

Rhetoric Review (RR) is a scholarly interdisciplinary journal of rhetoric that publishes in all areas of rhetoric and writing, and provides a professional forum for its readers to consider and discuss current topics and issues. This peer-reviewed journal publishes manuscripts that explore the breadth and depth of the discipline, including history, theory, writing, praxis, philosophy, professional writing, rhetorical criticism, cultural studies, multiple literacies, technology, public address, graduate education, and professional issues.

Learn more about Rhetoric Review

Polyglossia is an English Studies research journal edited and judged by members of the Lambda Delta (ISU) chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society. All English majors and minors are welcome to submit essays. Polyglossia is published twice a year. The Fall issue features essays written by undergraduate students, and the Spring issue features essays written by graduate students.

The first undergraduate volume of Polyglossia was published in Fall 1997; the first graduate volume in Spring 2006. The title of the journal comes from a quotation by the Russian theorist M.M. Bakhtin, "The world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly. . . Languages throw light on each other: one language can, after all, see itself only in the light of another language."

For more information about the journal or about Sigma Tau Delta, contact Dr. Sally Parry, Dr. Robert McLaughlin, or Mark Vegter, Polyglassia Advisors and Sigma Tau Delta co-sponsors.

The Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter is published twice a year under the auspices of the Publications Unit of the English Department at Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-4240. Each issue of the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter includes scholarly essays on Lewis's writings, mentions of Lewis in the news and in scholarship, and news of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis's hometown. There are occasional features on how to teach Lewis's works and news for book collectors, as well as calls for papers. Departments in most issues include Sinclair Lewis Miscellany, It Can't Happen Here News, Inquiring Minds (queries received), Book Notes, and What Were They Reading Then?—short essays about books popular when Lewis was writing.