SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

The official journal of the American Humor Studies Association, Studies in American Humor welcomes essay manuscripts of between 5000 and 8000 words on any topic, theme, practice, practitioner, and medium of American humor, broadly construed.  StAH values new transnational and interdisciplinary approaches as well as traditional critical and historical humanities scholarship.

The journal also invites individuals to send books for review; books and essays for our annual feature, “The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies”; and previously unpublished (or long lost) primary sources accompanied by short analytical essays our occasional feature, “The Recovery Room.”

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 . Please note that under the terms of our agreement with Penn State University Press (PSUP), membership in AHSA includes both a print subscription and online access to StAH along with our semi-annual electronic newsletter, To Wit, whereas a subscription purchased through PSUP does not confer membership in AHSA.

Essay submissions and materials for “The Year’s Work” and “The Recovery Room,” and other publication queries should be submitted through our online Editorial Manager portal. Books and inquiries about book reviews should be sent to Tracy Wuster, Book Review Editor, at wustert@gmail.com. Please address editorial queries and other correspondence to the Editor, Judith Yaross Lee, at <studiesinamericanhumor@ohio.edu>.

Permissions inquiries, as well as announcements, should be directed to the Editor, Judith Yaross Lee at <studiesinamericanhumor@ohio.edu>.

 

General Submission Information

• StAH uses a double-blind 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 150 words to be entered on the Editorial Manager submission page directly below the title of the submitted manuscript. Provide up to 8 carefully selected key words to maximize discoverability of the published article through database searches.
• Authors of accepted submissions will be asked to provide a contributor’s note of up to 100 words.
• 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

• Essay manuscripts should be between 5000 and 8000 words in length.
• Articles should be submitted as Microsoft Word or RTF files.
• Illustrations at the size the images should appear in print should be submitted as individual digital files of at least 300 dpi (600 is better) in TIFF or .JPG format.

Style

• 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.
• Endnotes are used to elaborate on information presented in the article text, including bibliographic information.

• Citations:
  • Manuscripts must consistently conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition (CMS), using the bibliographical format detailed in chapter 14. Sample reference citations for journal articles and books are shown below. For more examples, please check CMS.
  • A separate bibliography or reference list will NOT follow the endnotes. Therefore, in order for readers to locate the complete source, initial citations to short works such as journal articles or book chapters must contain the full range of pages for the source, in addition to any individual page or shorter range for the specific cited material at hand, as in the following examples:

• Eleanor Lewis Lambert, “Emily Dickinson’s Joke About Death,” Studies in American Humor, n.s. 3, no. 27 (2013), 7-32; 10.
• Winifred Morgan, “Morphing Once Again: From Simon Suggs to Aunt Lucille,” in Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches, ed. Ed Piacentino (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 154-170.
• David Henry and Joe Henry, Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him, (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2013), 14.
• Bill Solomon, “The Schizoid Ethics of Black Humor: Southern, Fariña, and Pynchon,” Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 3 (2013), 254-75; 255.

• All subsequent references after the first should follow the CMS short title format: Author’s surname, short title, and page number, as exemplified below:
  • 17. Lambert, “Emily Dickinson’s Joke,” 18.
  • 21. Henry and Henry, Furious Cool, 123-35.
• Do not use Ibid. for successive references to a source.
• Manuscript references: When referring to manuscripts, the first citation must include the full manuscript information: City, Library, manuscript number, folio number.
• For other types of citations, please check the CMS.

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

• Books and inquiries about book reviews should be sent to Tracy Wuster, Book Review Editor, at <wustert@gmail.com>.

• Please structure your heading as in the following example:

No Joke: Making Jewish Humor. By Ruth R. Wisse. Princeton: 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. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. 294 pp.

Reviewed by David Gillota

• Sign your review with your name and affiliation.