Submissions

Submission is currently disabled for this journal.

This page is designed to help you ensure your submission is ready for and fits the scope of the journal.

Before submitting you should read over the guidelines here, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account).

Moveable Type is generally open for submissions of academic articles, book reviews, creative writing submissions and visual art between January and April each year. We advertise our calls for papers etc. on our website, Twitter, UPenn, the CFP list (https://www.cfplist.com/), and via our mailing list. If you are an administrator or an academic at an institution and would like to be added to our mailing list so you can share our calls for papers with your students, please get in touch using our 'Contact Us' page. 


About
Moveable Type is the Graduate, Peer-Reviewed Journal of the UCL English Department. 

It aims to provide a platform to showcase the high-quality work produced by students and researchers across the world. However, it also believes in the importance of helping early career researchers and students to enter the world of peer-reviewed academic publishing. 

Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions about what we do. 
Focus and Scope We publish one issue each year and that issue includes literary criticism, literary theory, book reviews, and creative writing that responds to our chosen theme. Past themes have included ‘Ambience’, ‘Unfeeling’ and ‘Nostalgia’. These themes are deliberately broad so they are open to interpretation, but they are also chosen to address contemporary, emergent and key issues in literary studies and the arts and humanities more generally. 
Author guidelines

An academic article should take a miniature deep dive into a topic in relation to its theme. It might take a single book as its focus or provide a discussion of several. It should use quotations, provide close-readings, and engage with literary criticism or theory.

Academic articles should be 3000-5000 words. Please ensure you do not include your name or any identifying information in your article submission document. Most importantly, your article should offer a clear response to the theme of the issue. 

A book review should tell readers what you think of a book. It can be an academic monograph, a non-fiction book, a novel, a poetry collection, a play, and so on. We don’t mind what kind of book it is, but we do want you to engage with it critically. This means you should write as formally as you would for an essay, but don’t hold back from telling us what you think. While it is good to know if a book is well-written, we are more interested in knowing what you think of a book’s relationship to our chosen theme for the issue. We want to know if it provides useful insight into how we might think about the theme. We want to know if you think it challenges how we think about a topic, if it provides needed representation, or if it fails to do these things. 

A creative writing article submission can be written in any genre, but it should be 2500 words at most. If you have a pitch for a longer piece, feel free to contact our editors to discuss. Importantly, as with book reviews and articles, we like creative submissions to respond to the theme of the issue too. Feel free to include a short paragraph long commentary about your submission and how it relates to the theme if you think this would be helpful for our editorial board. 


Author FAQs

Do you accept pitches for academic articles? 

We do not accept pitches for academic articles and instead base all decisions on the submission of full first-drafts of academic articles. Don’t worry—the articles don’t have to be perfectly polished as our editors are here to help you. However, if you wish, you may get in touch with us at editors.moveabletype@gmail.com to briefly discuss your article topic prior to submission. 


What do I need to send you when I submit an article, book review or creative submission? 

We need a bibliography (if relevant) and an author bio about yourself. If you like, you can also send us a short paragraph explaining how your work relates to the issue theme. This is not mandatory but it may help our editorial board to see how you have approached the subject—this is important as we judge submissions, in part, on their ability to address our chosen theme. 


How long should an academic article be? 

Academic articles should be 3000-5000 words. and include a bibliography and an author bio. 


Should I provide citations and footnotes? 

Yes. All submissions should use MHRA style referencing. This requires you to use footnotes and to cite works throughout. A free MHRA style guide can be found online. We encourage you to follow it as closely as possible. 


What should I make sure to include in an article or book review? 

A clear articulation of how your work relates to the theme. Make sure you address the theme clearly and throughout your writing, whether it is an article or a book review. If you are producing an article, we encourage you to engage with existing literary criticism or theory. By ‘engaging with literary criticism’ we mean doing things like responding to it, challenging it, or developing its arguments. Remember to include quotations and analysis for book reviews and articles, as we champion close-reading. Remember to include your point of view and make sure it comes through clearly. 


How long should a book review be? 

Book reviews should be 1500-2000 words. Please send completed submissions to editors.moveabletype@gmail.com.


How long should a Creative writing article submission be? 

Creative writing article submissions should be 2500 words at most. Please send completed submissions to editors.moveabletype@gmail.com

Peer Review

Moveable Type operates double blind peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Authors should submit an anonymous version of the manuscript, stripped of all identifying references to the author(s) for peer review.

Further information regarding peer review can be found on the UCL Open Access Student Journal Editorial Policy pages.

Publication Fees

All UCL Open Access Student Journals do not charge an Article-Processing Charge (APC) for submission or publication. UCL Open Access Student Journal authors of accepted papers will not be required to make an APC payment for submission or publication before publication of their article.

Publication Cycle This journal publishes one issue per year.

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