Theme "Cultural Studies and Humanities"

[Directory of OA Journals (DOAJ)]

Welcome to the sixth day of the DOAJ blog!

Today the DOAJ team is highlighting journals covering cultural studies and the humanities. It is often said that Open Access is growing more slowly in these disciplines, so we want to increase readership for those who are actually publishing and show you how many great journals covering cultural studies and the humanities that can be found in DOAJ!

At the moment DOAJ has got 203 journals belonging to the subject Literature and Languages. Among them are a number of journals covering small, specific areas. ImageTexT : Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a journal solely devoted to the studies of comics. The journal publishes three issues per year and often calls for papers on a theme. Last year they published a special issue on the famous graphic novel author Neil Gaiman, which we can recommend: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v4_1/.

Another journal covering a specific area is The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies which covers both literature, film and television studies. To make the scope of the journal fit with the web design the archive is found in a section called the Vault.

DOAJ has also got 35 listed journals on the subject Music. Samples : Notizen, Projekte und Kurzbeiträge zur Popularmusikforschung is a German journal covering research about popular music and related genres. Our member University of Maryland together with University of Regina publishes the journal Dancecult : Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. In this recently launched journal you can find articles about for example Rave and DJ Culture.

When it comes to journals about Arts and Architecture publishers have often put a lot of effort into making the web design a visual experience. On its first page Papers of Surrealism exposes art from the epoch it covers and Field : a Free Journal for Architecture directs the user to the minimalistic, but arty cover of the current issue when entering the site.

A lot of journals do not cover such specific subjects as the previously mentioned titles, but publish articles from the whole humanistic research area. These journals can usually be found among our Multidisciplinary journals. The journal Miranda is an example of such a journal. The journal is dedicated to cultural and social practices in the English-speaking world and published a couple of days ago a whole issue about women and the 20^th century warfare: http://www.miranda-ejournal.eu/1/miranda/index.xsp. Transit is on the other hand devoted to the German-speaking world. Among other things the journal covers history, sociology and migration in the German context.

At the moment DOAJ lists 131 journals about Philosophy and 65 journals about Religion. In the philosophy section you can find Foucault Studies, a journal on the subject Michel Foucault and the great impact he has on a great deal of disciplines. You can also find Analecta Hermeneutica which is dealing with hermeneutics and interpretation theory. In the religion section we have got the very popular journal Women in Judaism : a Multidisciplinary Journal which combines the fields religion and gender studies.

158 journals are listed in the subject History. A lot of them are in Spanish, like Memoria y Sociedad which publishes articles about Latin American history. More concerned with European and contemporary history is Zeithistorische Forschungen, which in 2006 published a whole issue about the 1970’s: http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/site/40208704/default.aspx

Do you think we have forgotten a great Open Access journal covering the humanities? Feel free to highlight it in the comment field and if it is not listed, please suggest it!