Contact Information

UCLA American Indian Studies Center
3220 Campbell Hall, Box 951548
Los Angeles, California 90095-1548
UNITED STATES

Editor-in-Chief, David Delgado Shorter: editorinchief@aisc.ucla.edu

Managing Editor, Chloë Badze: grieman@ucla.edu

Book Review Editor: review-ed@aisc.ucla.edu

For print copy of back issues, email sales@aisc.ucla.edu

For more: http://www.books.aisc.ucla.edu

Not Sure If Your Essay is Ready?

If you are unsure as to whether your writing is ready for submission to our peer-review journal, please consider reviewing the form letter we send to authors regarding their rejected submission. Since we do not have time to respond to authors needing developmental editing assistance, perhaps these items could serve as a checklist for you before submitting. Why might we reject for review submitted essays?

•    Pieces were submitted as a scholarly essay and are more akin to "commentaries" (which we do publish, see below) due to their lack of engagement with the most recent scholarship on a topic. Scholarly writing entails relying on specific page numbers in referenced work, generally speaking.  We regularly reject submissions that are duplicating previous scholarship such as the submitting author's own previously published work. We consider our audience very familiar with Indigenous Studies and matters of importance to Native communities; thus we often reject work that is aimed for readers with little-to-basic knowledge of Native peoples. 

•    Submissions are written in a journalistic style with a majority of claims unsubstantiated by the academic literature. Journalistic writing tends to feature many subsections within a paper whether they are titled or not as such, and/or paragraphs with less than five sentences which do not internally work through the interpretation of evidence in a rigorous manner. Scholarly audiences expect an introduction that provides a clear thesis, statements of the research’s significance, a discussion of methods, and a distinct scope of the paper’s major points that should align with any sections within the body of the paper. 

•    Often we reject submissions where the authors are not utilizing contemporary methods in Indigenous Studies, including but not limited to collaborative research, decolonial citational practices, or acknowledging the community-based ways of making knowledge most appropriate for the essay's subject.

•    In some cases, the writing submitted evidences paragraphs that are fragmentary, or not coherent, sentences that are not grammatical, or prose that is not fluid.

•    We publish scholarly essays ranging between 9k and 12k in words. Submissions less than 8k are generally returned without even an initial review simply due to not being a sustained analysis within the style established by our journal.

We aim to publish scholarship that establishes its significance in the scholarly literature of American Indian Studies. Please note that we do not publish fiction, poetry, or essays that primarily analyze fictional literature since multiple other journals focus on those works. We do invite works on museums, the visual arts (including filmic medium), and essay ranging across the arts, humanities, and social sciences.