Somewhat unrelated to the process of publishing this journal, but still quite amazing: Two members of the aspeers editorial staff were just published in The Atlantic Monthly. Responding to an essay contest on "The American Idea," Heather and Alexandra's contributions were selected top 25 out of 400 submissions to be published in this most prestigious venue.

Yes. We all had an idea of how exhausting this process would be. And yes, some of us had been there before. But still, all of us were amazed at how much time and energy thorough line editing will take, how much improvement can go into an already almost perfect List of Works Cited, how many times you can review a paper and still find misplaced commas... And no, this will not be perfect in the end, but a little closer, and then a little more.

Lest this go unnoticed in the midst of all these frenzies (copy editing, tsunami tuesday, copy editing, super bowl, ...): we are now fully featured at the American Studies Leipzig homepage :)

We've been receiving some questions on the editorial process and on what kind of feedback contributors can expect. We appreciate these questions, and since we feel that they are more general ones we have started an FAQ section to address these (and related) issues.

If you have more questions, feel free to email us and we'll get back to you. 

When we first set out on this project, we knew about the impressive productivity and the great enthusiasm of graduate students in European American Studies Programs. However, considering our extremely tight schedule, there was no way of telling whether we'd be able to reach these students. Now that the deadline for academic submissions passed this Sunday, we have to admit that the echo we recieved is way better than we had anticipated.

A number of people have contacted us to ask about our tight deadlines. Unfortunatelly, the extensive review process prevents us from moving the deadline. The deadline for the peer-reviewed academic part of aspeers will have to stay December 1. We appreciate your consideration.

Wahoo! We have been linked on two cool sites:

American Studies at the University of East Anglia:

http://american-studies-uea.blogspot.com/2007/11/news-aspeers-emerging-voices-in.html

Hip Hop Congress:

Our Call for Papers just went over the DGfA newsletter. Coming out on 31 October, it had missed the October issue by two days. We had been hoping that enough urgent news would pile up at the DGfA for them to issue an extra newsletter in between the regular cycles. It seems that this did not happen.

Today, we have launched our new homepage. Based on the open source Content Management Drupal, it will give us the flexibility and usability we will need in the future. The design has pretty much stayed the same...

enjoy!

We just ran into www.plexoft.com/SBF/A11.html, linking our page and adding some information on it: