Premodern Pasts, Inclusive Futures: A Guide to The Sundial

by The Sundial Editorial Board

Our Mission

The Sundial is a digital publication showcasing some of the most forward-thinking public humanities work in the fields of premodern studies. The essays we publish highlight ways we can use premodern pasts to engage with and interrogate our understanding of the world today. We are a space for authors to write for broader audiences and gain greater exposure for their work, a space to try out new, daring, risky ideas, and above all, a space where we continue to have difficult conversations and experience uncomfortable moments. At The Sundial we are creating a platform to think collectively about what inclusivity means and where we start building inclusive futures within premodern studies and beyond.

As a public-facing publication, we seek to provide a home for diverse voices and are committed to hosting conversations and promoting dialogues that point us toward different, more inclusive, futures. We welcome discussions of premodern cultural productions from a variety of perspectives in The Sundial, ranging from short critical pieces to new pedagogical approaches to interrogations of the premodern in popular and contemporary culture to emerging conversations in our fields.

As part of our mission to build more inclusive futures within premodern studies, we strive to also be inclusive in who we publish. We welcome pitches from students, scholars, teachers, and practitioners at all career levels to The Sundial, and are glad to work with interested authors at any point in the process to answer questions or offer feedback.

What follows is a guide for potential and previous Sundial authors. Below you’ll find information on our pitching and editorial process, our style and media usage guides, and resources for public writing, as well as language for framing your Sundial contribution for tenure or review. If you are just beginning to familiarize yourself with The Sundial or would like to explore potential models for Sundial pieces, we recommend reading the following sample pieces below as a good way to get started:

“Gone Funding Hunting Lately? Parenting, Pandemic, and Research-Related Travel” by Patricia Akhimie

“Teaching Premodern Asexualities and Aromanticisms” by Liza Blake

“Decolonizing Shakespeare? Toward an Antiracist, Culturally Sustaining Practice” by Katherine Gillen and Lisa Jennings

“Is Your Bread White Enough?: King Arthur Baking Company’s Racist Marketing History” by Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh

“Gender, Adaptation, and the Future in David Lowery’s The Green Knight” by Usha Vishnuvajjala

Pitching to the Sundial

Thinking about pitching to The Sundial? Take a look at some of our published pieces online, review our pitching advice below, and send us your pitch at acmrs.sundial@asu.edu.

As a digital, public-facing publication, we consider pitches for pieces of 1,000–1,500 words in length–any longer and digital audiences struggle to stay engaged. All images provided need to be high resolution, and we can only publish them under the following conditions: if you own the rights, if you have permission to use them, if they are in the public domain, or if they fall under fair use. You may also include other media, such as YouTube videos or audio, that meet this criteria. Please consult our Images, Media, and Fair Use section below for more information. We also ask that all sources be embedded into your piece as hyperlinks (check out this short article for tips on effective hyperlinking).

A strong pitch will:

• Introduce you. We want to know who you are, where you are (your affiliation or location), and what you do (your professional position). This will help give us a sense of the origin and approach for your pitch, but this information will not factor into our decision to publish your work.
• Introduce your writing. We’ll be considering the strength of your writing in the pitch itself as a part of our process, so make sure the voice and tone of your pitch fit with The Sundial. Our pieces are accessible, and your pitch is the first indication of how accessible your writing will be for Sundial readers.
• Situate the piece as part of a conversation. Feel free to provide links to other articles and essays in your pitch to offer a sense of the conversation. We strongly encourage linking to other articles in your piece!
• Be specific and focused. Pitches should be short (1–2 paragraphs on your idea, and 1 paragraph introducing yourself and telling us who you are).

Some common pitching pitfalls are:

• Treating the pitch as an abstract. A pitch is not an abstract.
• Not providing a clear idea of what your piece will be about and how you will approach the topic.
• Submitting a long piece that you plan to revise instead of a pitch.
• Writing in a voice and tone that do not fit The Sundial. We highly recommend reading a few published Sundial pieces to get a sense of how your work matches with us.

If you want to know more about the pitching process, we highly recommend this “How to Pitch” Guide by the Eidolon team as a useful resource.

Editorial Process

Once you submit your pitch to acmrs.sundial@asu.edu, a member of the Editorial Board will confirm receipt and will take the lead on evaluating your pitch in conversation with the Managing Editor and other members of the Editorial Board whose expertise is relevant to your topic. If we decide to move forward with your piece, we will invite you to submit a draft and will then work closely with you to revise your piece for publication. The editorial board is glad to answer questions and offer feedback at any point of the process, so please reach out with any inquiries!

Style Guide

Tips for Writing Accessible Pieces

While there are many online guides for writing accessible pieces (particularly for online, non-specialist audiences), the following links provide some guidance for thinking about how to organize any public humanities piece:

• “So You Wanna Write for the Public?” by The Humanities for the Public Good Initiative: This page provides links to a number of useful resources on writing for public audiences.
• “Writing for the Public” by Jerry Plotnick: A useful advice guide for writing for public audiences from the University College Writing Centre at the University of Toronto.
• “Best Practices for Writing With/About Visual Rhetoric” from the Purdue OWL: A useful list of best practices when writing about or in an image-heavy medium like digital, public facing publications.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about writing for The Sundial:

• The personal is certainly imbued in this work, but at heart, a piece for The Sundial is also a reading of a literary or cultural text, an art object, or a historical moment. Some readers are looking to connect this work to their own, or show these pieces to their students as examples of what one can do by using personal experience or social or political commentary to reflect on the humanities or what it means to be a scholar in the humanities.
• Remember that many of your readers are not specialists in medieval or early modern culture, literature, or history. You are absolutely welcome to use academic references, but make sure that the scholarly material you invoke is clear and as jargon-free as possible. Your readers are very intelligent — they simply don’t have your extensive training.
• Put the information that you want readers to know very early — with digital pieces, people stop reading a lot faster than they do other articles. NPR suggests that the pyramid structure of writing journalistic pieces doesn’t hold for digital content, and the same goes for public humanities pieces.

Culturally and Contextually Responsive Style

Since The Sundial publishes pieces from a variety of genres, perspectives, and disciplines, we ask authors to be mindful of style guides specific to their subject matter. For example, a piece considering the role of Indigenous studies in early medieval literature should generally adhere to Indigenous Style Guidelines. The Sundial’s editorial team takes into consideration the specific context of each piece when evaluating and editing for style. This short article, “Writing about Race, Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Disability” is a good introduction to the important but subtle style guidelines related to writing about historically marginalized groups with a specific focus on using responsible, people-centric language.

Images, Media, and Fair Use

All images used in The Sundial need to be either public domain, royalty-free, permission-granted, rights-owned, or fair use. If you want to use an image that isn’t in the public domain and that you do not own yourself, you either must have permission to use it, or it must fall under the category of “fair use.”

Fair use is somewhat murky to determine. However, for the sake of publishing in The Sundial, an image that could fall under fair use is one that is being directly critiqued or discussed within the article, and one that would not be available to purchase otherwise. For example, if you are writing an article about a contemporary film, you may use images of the film as long as you are citing them and discussing them directly in your article.

If you’re interested in more details about how fair use is determined, check out Columbia University Library’s article on fair use. The Sundial editorial team is also glad to answer any questions you have about incorporating media into your piece.

Medium allows authors to include both descriptive captions and alt-text for any images. To make your piece as accessible as possible, we ask that you provide descriptive captions we can use to create alt-text for all images. For tips on creating alt-text, check out these Tips and Tricks from the World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative. As they note in this guide, “alt text should be the most concise description possible of the image’s purpose.”

Language and Advice for Tenure/Review Statements

In tenure/review statements, we recommend mentioning your work for The Sundial, explaining its connection to your wider body of scholarship, and elucidating the overall importance of public humanities research for review committees who may not be familiar with its significance or the fact that it undergoes rigorous editorial review even though it isn’t published in a traditional peer-reviewed journal. In other words, your work for The Sundial is important, and you should make that clear to evaluators so that they recognize the significance of your scholarly labor and the relationship between public and academic writing.

We also recommend listing your work for The Sundial as “Writing for General Audiences” or a similar heading under “Publications” on your CV.

If you would like an update on the number of views for your Sundial piece to include in your review file, contact the Managing Editor at acmrs.sundial@asu.edu.

Sample language for tenure/review letters or statements:

“I have published [TITLE] in The Sundial, a public-facing digital publication of Arizona State University’s Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies that illuminates the premodern past’s importance for understanding the present and changing the future. It is connected to my research on [TOPIC]. Public humanities scholarship for The Sundial undergoes rigorous editorial review by a team of accomplished scholars and is valuable for multiple reasons: 1) due to its free, open access status, it is not constrained by the barriers of expensive subscriptions and institutional affiliation that prevent many interested readers from accessing scholarly work; 2) through its brevity, straightforward structure, and approachable language, it translates specialized academic knowledge — which typically reaches a narrow readership (especially for premodern scholars) — for much wider audiences to facilitate greater impact; and 3) its short length, timely subject matter, and accessibility make it ideally suited for inclusion on course syllabi, thus sharing my expertise with students far beyond [AUTHOR’S INSTITUTION] and showing students how they, too, can enter critical conversations.”

Additional Author Resources

Anticolonial Writing and Citational Practices

• “Writing About Race, Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Disability” by the Hamilton College Writing Center: This short guide provides a list of best-practices for writing about historically marginalized groups with a specific focus on using responsible, people-centric language.
• “A Copy Editor’s Education in Indigenous Style” by Tara Campbell and The University of British Columbia’s Indigenous Peoples: Language Guidelines [PDF]: Both of these guides detail how to write with and about Indigenous Peoples. Many of the requirements illustrated here, including using anti-colonial syntax, are also applicable to writing more alongside/with/for/about other historically marginalized groups.
• “Writing and Publishing While Black” by Dr. Valerie D. Landfair: This personal meditation on writing while Black illustrates some of the inherent barriers that Black writers face when presenting and publishing written work. This is a helpful reminder for both for writers and for the editorial team to be aware of structural inequities that need to be intentionally dismantled.
• “Waking Up to the Politics of Citation” by Molly Rivers: A good reminder that citational politics are real, even in publications like The Sundial where work is being cited through hyperlinks. This citational medium presents new opportunities to disrupt citational structures that de-value or de-emphasize other forms of community knowledge production, like Twitter threads, blog posts, podcasts, etc. and this article gives some suggestions for how to do that most effectively.

Best Practices / Guidelines for Public Writing

• “What Academics Misunderstand About ‘Public Writing” by Irina Dumitrescu, “How Little Do Users Read?” by Jakob Nielsen, and “Text Scanning Patterns: Eyetracking Evidence” by Kara Pernice: These three links orient Sundial authors within the space of digital publishing, highlighting both common misconceptions that academics might bring to public writing projects, and explaining how readers interact with digitally published work. The articles about text scanning patterns are particularly useful for thinking about genre and audience.
• “Writing for the Public” by Jerry Plotnick: A useful advice guide for writing for public audiences from the University College Writing Centre at the University of Toronto.
• “Best Practices for Writing With/About Visual Rhetoric” from the Purdue OWL: Since The Sundial is a digital publication thinking about with and about visual rhetoric is an important factor. Authors aren’t just writing a short essay, they also need to be thinking about how the finished product might look on the screen.
• “Context and Colonial Amnesia” AKA “Links and Graphics are Your Friends!” from Reporting in Indigenous Communities: For authors struggling with 1,000–1,500 word limit, this article gives some strategies for using hyperlinks / visual rhetoric to fill in context or backstory that would otherwise take up valuable word count.

Pitching and Justifying Public Facing Work

• Eidolon’s “How to Pitch” Guide: This piece gives potential contributors a sense of how a “pitch” differs from an abstract with a detailed how-to guide.
• “Writing for the Public Can Help Improve Academic Writing” by Jonathan Wal: This short article published by Psychology Today makes a cogent argument for the value of public writing. It is helpful for potential pitchers to think about the difference between academic and public writing, in addition to providing language for supporting Sundial publications in a tenure file.
• “Is There a Future for Creative Academic Writing in Academia?” by Megan Kate Nelson: Historian and public writing Megan Kate Nelson describes the role that creative academic writing (AKA public writing) plays in both areas. Helpful, again, to orient potential pitches and for supporting tenure cases.

The Sundial Editorial Board

Mira Kafantaris, Early Modern Section Editor

Hassana Moosa, Early Modern Section Editor

Daniel Najork, Medieval Section Editor

Leah Newsom, Manager of Marketing and Communications

Ryan Randle, Medieval Section Editor