Across US literary and media histories, editing has often taken a backseat to other, more deliberately visible forms of expression. Yet many we associate with North American cultural history worked as editors, from icons like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to a host of important “content creators” like Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Margaret Fuller, Pauline Hopkins, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, or José Martí. In part, the historical lack of attention to editors and their labor is baked into editorship itself: although sometimes maligned as gatekeepers (a là William Dean Howells) or celebrated as industry titans (a lá Horace Greeley) much of the work of editorship involves disappearing behind the newspaper’s page, the reporter’s update, or the author’s edition. Yet as creative and formalizing forces who mediate experience through image and text, editors shape the worlds we encounter through print and other forms of mass media.

Scholarly attention to editorship has included many studies of individual editors like those referenced above. Increasingly, studies of cultural and literary history have accounted in new ways for the social, cultural, and aesthetic mediations of editorship as a profession. Books like Jordan Carroll’s Reading the Obscene (2021), Abram Foley’s The Editor Function (2021), or Brigitte Fielder’s and Jonathan Senchyne’s Against a Sharp White Background (2019) have worked to name and theorize the cultural contexts of editorial labor and aesthetics. From special issues like Atlantic World ’s “Black Editorship and the Early Atlantic World” (2021) to articles like Jim Casey and Sarah Salter’s “With, Without, Even Still” (American Literature, 2022), scholars have contextualized editorship as itself a cultural arena that enables communities across nations and social histories to communicate through the affordances of print culture. This panel contributes to the emerging sub-field of editorship studies by inviting contemporary editors to reflect on the founding, growth, and development of scholarly periodicals for which they serve as editors.

Ittai Orr will discuss the founding and current operation of Insurrect! an online journal whose publications confront colonial violence, capitalism, and white supremacy in the present and honor the legacy of anti-colonial movements in the history of the Americas. Daniel Sinykin will describe the institutional history of born-digital journal Post45 and reflect on its contemporary editorial organization. Sarah Chinn, newly appointed co-editor of J19, will offer her perspective about inaugurating an new editorial collective at an established journal that includes innovative features highlighting scholarly conversation and multimedia history. Finally, Eugenia Zuroski will act as respondent, summarizing some of the ways she sees these editors working within and extending the practices and aesthetics of historical editorship as those are reflected in contemporary editors gathered together for this panel. Sarah Salter will moderate and facilitate the conversation.