Submissions

Submission Instructions

Meliora, Barnard College’s journal for English theses, provides a platform for the range of emerging voices within our intellectual community. We hope to collectively create an open repository of knowledge that embraces novel and critical perspectives. We publish English senior theses written by Barnard students, and we encourage a diverse range of topics. All submissions that meet the necessary guidelines detailed below will receive careful and fair consideration. We look forward to reviewing your contribution.

Submissions

Meliora accepts English department senior theses written within two semesters of the current submission cycle (i.e. for the spring issue, essays written in the previous spring and fall are considered). We welcome theses from a variety of topics and consider submissions from English Senior Seminars as well as Senior Special Project courses. Full text length will be limited within the range of approximately 4000-9000 words. Submissions to Meliora are made through our online system; you can register here. 

Please submit the following within a single Microsoft Word document with a .doc or .docx extension in the order listed below:

• The full text of your thesis following the stylistic guidelines outlined in the Journal Formatting section.
  • All texts should be between approximately 4,000 and 9,000 words in length. Excerpts will not be accepted. Please ensure your title is in the header of the first page, your pages are numbered, and your name is not included anywhere on the document.
• A bibliography in MLA Eighth Edition formatting.
• A list of catologue-style image citations and descriptions (if applicable).  
  • See guidelines below for further information and examples. 

After attaching the full text, you will be prompted to enter your abstract. This includes your thesis methodology and any relevant collections, authors, or locations to be included in the submissions form. The length should be limited to 150-200 words.

Manuscript Preparation

• Originality
  • All texts should be original and neither previously published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere.
  • All quotations and references should have been verified upon submission.
• Peer Review
  • References to the author should be in third person to preserve anonymity for peer review.
  • The journal employs a double-blind review process. In this process, the identities of the reviewer and author are concealed from one another. When the review process is finalized, the author may be informed of their reviewer by request.
  • The pool of reviewers consists of graduate students and faculty involved in the English Department and related humanities fields at Barnard College and Columbia University. 
• Supplementary Materials
  • Please ensure that images are of a suitable standard to reproduce, at least 300 dpi. Images may be submitted as PNG or JPEG files.
  • Number figures in order and make sure that image files can be clearly identified from their file-names.
  • All images must have a catalogue-style captions supplied as a separate list in the submission document. Captions should be placed above the image and must include any of the following that apply to the image:
    • Maker
    • Title (in italics)
    • Date
    • Medium
    • Measurements (in centimeters or meters)
    • Location (Institution, Geographic location)
    • Copyright statement
    • Courtesy line and/or photo credit

Examples:

Fig 1.​​ Yinka Shonibare, ​The Swing (after Fragonard)​, 2001, mannequin, cotton costume, 2 slippers, swing seat, 2 ropes, oak twig and artificial foliage, 3.3 x 3.5 x 2.2 m (Tate, London) © Yinka Shonibare; image courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Fig 2.​​ Katsushika Hokusai, ​Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known as ‘The Wave’,​ ca. 1830-32, Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 25.7 x 37.9 cm (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Public Domain

• • Along with a caption for each image, include a brief description of the image (i.e. what the image contains and looks like). These descriptions will help us to include alt. text in our published articles to ensure accessibility.
    • Regarding questions about how to write effective image descriptions, see this article.
• Selection for Publication
  • After peer review, authors will be alerted by an editor if their manuscript has been accepted for publication.
  • Authors must maintain contact with the editorial team throughout the editing process and commit to responding to the editor’s comments, then resubmitting.
  • Throughout the process, the development editors will give clear deadlines for the authors.
  • If the author does not respond within that time frame, the development editors will reach out twice more. If they still do not respond, the development editors will not continue with the manuscript, and the submission will not be published.
• Resubmissions
  • Resubmissions will be accepted so long as the thesis was written within two semesters of the current submission cycle.

Journal Style and Formatting

MLA Eighth Edition is used for the format of the journal. If you require further guidance on how to format your paper for submission to the journal, you can visit owl.purdue.edu for assistance on the expected guidelines. Additionally, the journal adheres to the following style preferences for all published papers:

• 12-point font
• Double spaced
• Indented paragraphs
• Reference book titles using italics
• Reference article titles using quotation marks
• Notes formatted via footnotes
• Page numbers located in the top-right corner
• Any illustrations, figures, and tables embedded within the text at the appropriate locations

Author Agreement

The author will be obligated to sign an agreement when they submit to participate throughout the editing process. This process is done to ensure a commitment on both the part of the author and the journal. After publication, the author maintains ownership copyright of their piece.