Submission Guidelines

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

The official journal of the American Humor Studies Association, Studies in American Humor welcomes manuscripts of between 5000 and 8000 words on any topic, theme, practice, practitioner, or medium of American humor, broadly construed. StAH values new transnational and interdisciplinary approaches as well as traditional critical and historical humanities scholarship. In addition to scholarly articles and book reviews, StAH invites excerpts of unpublished (or long lost) primary sources accompanied by short analytical discussions for our occasional feature, “The Recovery Room.” Our editorial board does not review empirical and quantitative research studies.

Please submit all manuscripts through our online Editorial Manager portal. Books and inquiries about book reviews should be sent to Brett Ingram, Book Review Editor, at brett.ingram@bc.edu. Queries about manuscripts for “The Recovery Room” and articles for our annual feature, “The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies,” should be sent to stah@press.psu.edu.

Please address editorial queries, permissions inquiries, and other correspondence, including announcements, to the Editor, Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, at stah@press.psu.edu.

All contributors must be members in good standing of the American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) at the time of publication. Membership information is available on the AHSA website, http://americanhumorstudiesassociation.wordpress.com. Please note that under our agreement with Penn State University Press (PSUP), membership in AHSA includes both a print subscription and online access to StAH as well as our semi-annual electronic newsletter, To Wit, whereas a subscription purchased through PSUP does not confer membership in AHSA.

General Submission Information

  • StAH uses a double-anonymous review process; please remove all references to or clues about your identity as author(s) from the main text and endnotes.
  • Submissions should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 200 words to be entered on the Editorial Manager submission page directly below the title of the submitted manuscript. Provide up to five carefully selected key words to maximize discoverability of the published article through database searches.
  • Authors guarantee that the contribution does not infringe any copyright, violate any other property rights, or contain any scandalous, libelous, or unlawful matter.
  • Authors guarantee that the contribution has not been published elsewhere and is not currently under consideration elsewhere.
  • Authors of accepted submissions are responsible for securing permissions and paying the required fees for publication beyond fair use of any material under copyright. Copies of permission letters should be sent to the Pennsylvania State University Press as soon as practical following acceptance of the submission.

Manuscript Format

  • Article manuscripts should be between 5000 and 8000 words in length.
  • Articles should be submitted as Microsoft Word files.
  • Illustrations at the size the images should appear in print should be submitted separately from the manuscript as individual digital files of at least 600 dpi in JPG format with at least 2.25 inches in width.
  • Authors need to provide alt text to describe images, graphics, tables for screen readers for those with disabilities. Please see the PSU Press Alt Text Guide below for further information on writing alt text.

Style

  1. StAH uses footnotes following Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Chapters 13 and 14 provides a full list of citation formats for different sources. For each initial citation, provide a footnote in Chicago style, and each subsequent citation should be cited parenthetically in the text.
  2. We do not include separate bibliography or reference list. Thus, initial citations to articles, essays, and other short works must therefore contain the complete page range in addition to any single page or shorter range for a specific quotation or paraphrase so that our readers may understand the scope of and easily locate a complete article or book chapter. Please provide page citations for paraphrases and summaries as well as for quotations.
  3. We discourage the use of discursive notes. Please consider the importance of discursive information that you may be inclined to include in a note. If it is sufficiently significant, it should be developed in the text of the essay; if not, then in most cases it should be deleted.
  4. Note the original year(s) of publication or production in parentheses following the first mention of any primary source to historicize the discussion or analysis. For films, please include director’s surname along with date. For television shows, please include network and inclusive dates.

Citation format examples

Footnote for a book:

  1. David Henry and Joe Henry, Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him (Algonquin Books, 2013), 14­–15.

(N.B. First and last names in normal order; no comma after the first name in a two-author book; headline punctuation capitalizes all words in title except mid-title conjunctions and articles; no periods separate the author, title, and publication components; no abbreviation precedes page numbers; include all digits for page ranges numbered 100 and below.)

Footnote for an edited book:

  1. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd, eds., A Companion to Mark Twain (Blackwell, 2005).

(N.B. Abbreviation for editors’ role follows their names and precedes book title when the whole book is cited; Blackwell Publishing may be reduced to Blackwell if such shortening is consistent in book citations throughout the manuscript.)

Footnote for a chapter in an edited book:

  1. Winifred Morgan, “Morphing Once Again: From Simon Suggs to Aunt Lucille,” in Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches, ed. Ed Piacentino (University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 154–70; 166–68.

(N.B. Abbreviation for the editor’s role follows the book title and precedes the name when a chapter is cited instead of the whole volume—a reversal of the sequence used for citing whole books; comma precedes quotation marks at the end of the title; no other punctuation separates the editor’s name from the publication information in parentheses; comma separates publication details from the page numbers; full range of pages for the chapter precedes the cited page(s); a semicolon separates the full page range from the cited pages.)

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Footnote for a journal article:

  1. Thomas Inge, “William Faulkner and George Washington Harris: In the Tradition of Southwestern Humor,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 7 (1962): 47–59; 51–52.
  2. Eleanor Lewis Lambert, “Emily Dickinson’s Joke About Death,” Studies in American Humor s. 3, no. 27 (2013): 7–32; 10.
  3. Rob King, “Humor Across Media in the 1920s and 1930s: An Introduction,” Studies in American Humor  4, 1, no. 2 (2015): 135–141; 137–38.

(N.B. Provide full range of pages for journal articles; separate volume (or series) and issue numbers with a comma and the abbreviation no. for number; enclose the date in parentheses; separate the parenthetic date from page numbers with a colon; add cited page(s) following the full page range, separated by a semicolon. In citing articles from Studies in American Humor, please note that it has numbered issues variably in its three series—the original series, n.s., and n.s. 3—occasionally without collecting them into numbered volumes.)

  1. Lambert, “Emily Dickinson’s Joke,” 30. 12. King, “Humor Across Media,” 135.

 

Footnote for or a DVD (CMS 14.165):

  1. Richard Pryor, writer and performer, Richard Pryor Live and Smokin’, directed by Michael Blum, performed at the New York Improvisation on April 20, 1971 (MPI Home Video, 1997), DVD, 46 min.; quotation at 29:32.

(N.B. Roles are indicated without abbreviations in whatever order suits your emphasis; indicate media type after the publication information; in some cases, you may wish to indicate with timing notations where on a disc a quoted passage occurs.)

 

Footnote for a TV program:

  1. “Crate,” Veep, season 3, episode 9, directed by Armando Iannucci and written by Iannucci, Simon Blackwell, and Georgia Pritchett, televised by HBO on June 8, 2014.

(N.B. roles are indicated without abbreviations in whatever order suits your emphasis; indicate network and original distribution date; no need for online access dates.)

  1. “Crate,” Veep, 18:15–20:30.

 

Footnote for an online video:

  1. Issa Rae, writer and performer, “The Job,” The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, season 1, episode 1, web series, http://www.issarae.com/awkward-black-girl/. Hereafter cited as MABG.
  2. Rae, “The Job,” MABG, 12:30.
  3. “President Obama Speaks at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner,” YouTube, 32 min., 38 sec., from a performance televised by C-SPAN on April 30, 2016, posted by The White House, April 30, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-5vD5YVLv8; the fictitious conversation between Obama and former House Speaker John Boehner begins at 25:52.

(N.B. Posting information not needed for videos posted by the originating organization.)

  1. “President Obama Speaks.”
  2. “Negrotown,” Key & Peele, season 4, episode 11, directed by Peter Atenccio, televised by Comedy Central on May 6, 2015, http://www.cc.com/video-clips/y6kq99/key-and-peele-negrotown-uncensored. Successive references from this episode come from this source.

 

For an archival source:

  1. Script for the Canada Dry Ginger Ale Program, May 2, 1932, Radio Scripts, box 1, file 1, collection 134, Jack Benny Papers, University of California at Los Angeles Library.
  2. Script for the Canada Dry Ginger Ale Program, May 2, 1932.

Subsequent Citations:

The above format should be followed for the initial citation of each source.  All subsequent citations should be cited in text parenthetically.  For example:

Like snatches of familiar music, parody echoes the original work through allusion, quotation, or meter, but it is “repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (A Theory of Parody, 6).

 

Writing Abstracts

An abstract is a self-contained piece of writing that can be understood independently from the article. It must be brief (approximately 100–200 words) and may include these elements:

– Statement of the problem and objectives (gap in literature on this topic)

– Thesis statement or question

– Summary of employed methods, viewpoint, research approach, conclusion(s) and/or

implications of research

Keep in Mind… Depending on your rhetorical strategy, an abstract need not include your entire conclusion, as you may want to reserve this for readers of your article. The abstract should, however, clearly and concisely indicate to the reader what questions will be answered in the article. You want to cultivate anticipation so the reader knows exactly what to expect when reading the article—if not the precise details of your conclusion(s).

Do

– Include your thesis, usually in the first 1–2 sentences
– Provide background information placing your work in the larger body of literature
– Use the same chronological structure as the original work
– Follow lucid and concise prose
– Explain the purpose of the work and methods used
– Use keywords and phrases that quickly identify the content and focus of the work
– Mimic the type and style of language found in the original article, including technical language

Do not

– Refer extensively to other works
– Add information not contained in the original work

– Define terms
– Repeat or rephrase your title

– Use first person in abstracts. So, instead of, “In this article, I analyze,” use: “This article analyzes”

Examples:

The abstract should begin with a clear sense of the research question and thesis.

While some recent scholars claim to have refuted the relevance of stylometric analysis for Plato studies, new technological advances reopen the question. This article uses two recently completed stylometric analyses of the Platonic corpus to show that advanced artificial intelligence techniques such as genetic algorithms can serve as a foundation for chronological assertions.

It is often useful to identify the theoretical or methodological school used to approach the thesis question and/or to position the article within an ongoing debate. This helps readers situate the article in the larger conversations of your discipline.

The debate among Watts, Koupria, and Brecker over the reliability of stylometry (PMLA 126.5, Fall 2009) suggests that . . .” or “Using the definition of style proposed by Markos (2014), this article argues that . . .”

Finally, briefly state the conclusion.

Through analyzing the results of Watts and Koupria’s genetic algorithmic stylometry, this article demonstrates that they provide solutions to roadblocks previously identified in stylometric analyses of the Platonic corpus for the purposes of developing a reliable chronology. These solutions . . .

 

Translations

  • Include translations for all quotations in languages other than English. Translations for individual foreign words, run-in quotes, and block quotes should be in parentheses.
  • In general, translations should be accompanied by the original quotation in the endnotes.

Book reviews

  • Please structure your heading as in the following example:

 

No Joke: Making Jewish Humor. By Ruth R. Wisse. Princeton University Press, 2013. 279 pp.

Reviewed by Rachel Trousdale

Saturday Night Live and American TV. Edited by Nick Marx, Matt Sienkiwicz, and Ron Becker. Indiana University Press, 2013. 294 pp.

Reviewed by David Gillota

  • Sign your review with your name and affiliation.

PSU PRESS ALT TEXT GUIDE

Penn State University Press is committed to making its publications accessible to the widest audience possible. The inclusion of alternative text (or “alt text”) will allow those using assistive technology to access the images and other graphic elements (such as tables, charts, graphs, and maps) in the digital formats of articles. Authors are encouraged to submit alt text (and where necessary, extended descriptions) for all images and other graphic elements in their manuscripts.

Note: If sufficient information about the image is included in the caption or the text, alt text may be unnecessary.

 

General Guidelines for Composing Alt Text

Alt text should clearly and concisely describe the content and function of an image. Please limit the description to the most important elements of the image. In most cases a one- or two-sentence description, consisting of no more than 250 characters (not including spaces), should suffice. If more than 250 characters are needed to convey the content and function of an image, please provide an extended description in addition to the alt text.

Extended Description

For more complex images and graphic elements (such as graphs, charts, and maps), please provide an extended description with the necessary information. Any visible English text in an image must be transcribed in the extended description. Please note that images requiring an extended description must also have the shorter alt text.

Formatting and Submitting Alt Text

Alt text should be submitted along with captions. The alt text for a figure should be set on a new line after the caption and should be preceded by <alt text>. An extended description, when necessary, should be treated in a similar manner, preceded by <extended description>. When drafting and formatting alt text, you should:

  • capitalize acronyms so assistive technology reads them as separate letters and not words (e.g., US versus us);
  • avoid complex symbols, such as brackets, quotation marks, dashes, ellipses, and mathematical symbols, as assistive technology does not treat all of these symbols consistently;
  • write in complete sentences but avoid overly complex sentence structures.

For examples as well as additional information and resources, see here.

 

Final Submission Checklist

  • All authors and coauthors are listed in the submissions interface.
  • At least one author has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details:
      • E-mail address
      • Affiliation
      • ORCID number has been provided (if you have one)
  • Necessary funding statements have been provided, including funding organization name, the organization’s DOI, and grant numbers if you have them.
  • All necessary files have been uploaded. Submission must include:
      • Abstracts (100–200 words)
      • Keywords (3–5)
      • Separate image files (tiff, jpg, include relevant captions, not inserted into Word file)
      • All tables (including titles, description, footnotes)
      • Ensure all figure and table citations in the text match the files provided.
  • Journal policies detailed in submission guidelines have been reviewed and journal style guide has been followed.
  • Manuscript has been checked for spelling and grammar.
  • Manuscript and Notes and or Works Cited sections follow the most recent Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition) for formatting and language.
  • You have used endnotes and not footnotes.
  • All references mentioned in the Works Cited list are cited in the text.
  • If you only have 1 note or 1 work cited, the sections are called Note or Work Cited (not Notes or Works Cited).
  • If your article includes notes, you have used shorten citations instead of ibid (See CMOS 18, 13.37).
  • Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet and for image use). Please provide permission documentation to journal editor for images or long text excerpts under copyright.
  • All figures have been provided as individual image files (not inserted into Microsoft Word) and are 300 dpi at a sizing of at least 2.25 inches wide.
  • Alt text has been provided to describe provided for all supplied images, tables, and charts. See PSU Press Alt Text Guide in submission guidelines and reference more information here.
  • You have saved your article in a docx file format, not as a PDF or other file format.