About the Journal of the British Academy

Connecting knowledge – Deepening inquiry – Pushing boundaries

The Journal of the British Academy is an online, open access journal, showcasing the very best research in the humanities and social sciences. It aims to deepen and connect scholarship – not only within the humanities and social sciences, but across and between them – creating a platform for innovative interdisciplinary methods, perspectives and approaches.

The Journal promotes original, stimulating, and disciplinary-diverse knowledge as a vital dimension of broader engagement with multiple audiences. It welcomes research that pushes at boundaries and is accessible to different readerships. It seeks to sustain distinctive knowledge, which is necessary to inform the political, social, cultural and global challenges of the present, to critically re-examine the past, and to shape the future.

The Journal publishes high-quality articles that are in line with the Journal’s aims, written by those who have been supported through any of the British Academy’s programmes and activities, and by Fellows of the British Academy – including articles derived from the programme of British Academy Lectures.

From Volume 12 (2024), articles are grouped into four issues. Types of articles include:

• research article (typically 7-10,000 words) – an original and accessible piece of scholarship that makes a new contribution to knowledge, (inter)disciplinarity, methods and/or analysis;
• commentary (usually less than 7,000 words) – a well-argued perspective on events, policies, or disciplinary developments;
• thematic collection – typically 4-6 research articles (each of the same length, c.1-5,000 words) covering different topics/disciplinary approaches on the same theme, plus an introduction; the articles in Issue 4 each year will predominantly be on one theme;
• personal reflection (any length up to 8,000 words) – a contribution that usually emanates from a high-profile figure in their field or discipline, which may or may not be based in academic scholarship;
• interview/discussion between two or more academics on a recent publication or academic development;
• response to an article recently published in the Journal.

Articles should be inclusive and accessible to readers who are not specialists in a particular field. For some articles, the appropriate readership may include those with related non-academic expertise (e.g. practitioners or policymakers).

Articles are published on this Journal website, currently as downloadable PDF files. Each article (or thematic collection) is posted once it is ready for publication.

Open access

The Journal of the British Academy is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Authors may post the published PDF file version of record of their article to institutional or centrally organised subject repositories.

Funder requirements. Where an author acknowledges research funding that brings with it a requirement that the article should be published under a CC BY licence, the author should contact [email protected] so that this licence may be applied to their article. The British Academy recognises the extra protection that is afforded to authors’ work by the ‘No Derivatives’ element of the Creative Commons licence, and notes that some authors may be able to apply to their funder to allow their article to be published under a CC BY-ND licence.

Copyright in an article remains vested in the author(s).

Open access publication in the Journal is supported by the British Academy. Authors are not charged a fee for article submission or publication.

The Journal of the British Academy is listed in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals):
https://doaj.org/toc/2052-7217.

The Journal of the British Academy has also been accepted for inclusion in Scopus (information to follow).

The Editors of the Journal are: Professor Elizabeth Edwards FBA (De Montfort University, emerita), Professor Andrew Hadfield FBA (University of Sussex), Professor Fiona Williams FBA (University of Leeds, emeritus).

Thematic collections of articles may have guest editors, working under the general supervision of the Editors.

Each full article is reviewed by independent expert readers (normally at least two). The copy of the article text sent for review will not include the name(s) of the author(s) or other authorship information on the title page. As part of the review process, you may be asked to make reasonable changes to the text. The final decision on acceptance of an article for inclusion in the Journal rests with the Editors.

All correspondence on editorial matters – including any suggestions for possible future articles from anyone who has been supported through any of the British Academy’s programmes and activities or from any Fellow of the British Academy – should be sent to: [email protected], or to Head of Publishing, The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH.

The members of the Editorial Board of the Journal are: Dr Sarah Abel (University of Cambridge), Dr Bergit Arends ( The Courtauld Institute of Art), Professor Maxine Berg FBA (University of Warwick), Professor Gurminder Bhambra FBA (University of Sussex), Professor Georgina Born FBA (University College London), Professor Rachel Bowlby FBA (University College London), Professor Ian Christie FBA (Birkbeck, University of London), Professor Davina Cooper FBA (King’s College London), Dr Daniel Eltringham (University of Sheffield), Professor Emily Jackson FBA (London School of Economics), Dr Cadence Kinsey (University College London), Professor Tendai Mangena (University of Leeds), Dr Josh Milburn (Loughborough University), Dr Daisy Ogembo (University of Birmingham), Professor Arkebe Oqubay Metiku (SOAS), Dr Laurie Parsons (Royal Holloway, University of London), Professor Anne Phillips FBA (London School of Economics, emeritus), Professor Dorothy Price FBA (Courtauld Institute of Art), Professor Richard Sennett FBA (London School of Economics), Professor Tom Shakespeare FBA (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), Professor Gregory Smithers (University of Hull).

Notes to Authors on the preparation of articles for the Journal.

The Journal of the British Academy is owned and published by
The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH

Contact: [email protected]

Ethics statement.

Archiving. The content of the Journal is preserved through CLOCKSS digital preservation services.