Pacific Coast Philology

Pacific Coast Philology, the journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, has been a leading west coast literary and cultural studies journal publishing peer-reviewed essays of interest to scholars in the classical and modern languages, literatures, and cultures for over fifty years. Pacific Coast Philology publishes two annual issues on a wide array of timely, thought-provoking topics in the areas of culture, literature, aesthetics, ideology, film, and theory. Select issues of Pacific Coast Philology also include book reviews, the PAMLA Presidential Address, Forum, and the Plenary Address from the annual conference.

Pacific Coast Philology often publishes special issues dedicated to special topics. The 2014 special issue guest edited by Lorely French was titled “Migration, Immigration, and Movement in Literatures, Film, and Culture”; the 2015 special issue guest edited by Cheryl D. Edelson was titled “Familiar Spirits”; the 2016 special issue guest edited by Ana María Rodríguez-Vivaldi was titled “Hybrids and Other Fusions”; the 2017 special issue guest edited by John M. Ganim was titled “Libraries, Archives, Properties”; the 2018 special issue guest edited by Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod was titled “The Metafamily”; the 2019 special issue guest edited by Andrea Gogröf was titled “Ways of Seeing: Visuality, Visibility, and Vision”; the 2020 special issue guest edited by Katherine Kinney was titled “Actors, Stages, Worlds”; the 2021 special issue guest edited by Stanley Orr was titled “Send in the Clowns.”

The journal comes to members by way of Penn State University Press. Paid PAMLA members receive two issues of the journal for their membership, and may also access back issues going all the way back to 1966 (via pamla.ballastacademic.com).

Pacific Coast Philology Outstanding Articles

The Pacific Coast Philology Outstanding Article Award was established in 2017 to celebrate the most innovative, enlightening, and engaging peer-reviewed essays published in PAMLA’s Pacific Coast Philology journal. We are very proud of the incredible quality of our publication, and we encourage anyone interested in submitting an essay to Pacific Coast Philology to check out our Outstanding Article honorees from previous years. These articles are exemplary samples that Pacific Coast Philology is eager to share with scholars seeking to submit to the journal (and many outstanding articles are available for you to read thanks to Penn State University Press, even if you aren’t a current PAMLA member). A list of the recipients of the Outstanding Article Award and open access articles can be found here.

Submission Guidelines

Pacific Coast Philology publishes peer-reviewed essays of interest to scholars in the classical and modern languages, literatures, and cultures. Essays may be submitted any time throughout the year. While we welcome articles that grow out of papers delivered at the Annual Conferences of PAMLA, we especially encourage essays submitted independently of the conference.

We are open to papers on a variety of topics, but desire manuscripts written for a broad scholarly audience, essays with a clear, highly developed main thesis, essays that contextualize analysis within the relevant theoretical framework, and most importantly essays that further the discourse on the topic in an interesting and thought-provoking way. We request manuscripts of between 4,000 to 8,000 words.

Before submitting, please edit with attention to style, grammar, and bibliographical citations using the latest MLA handbook rules.

Please submit essays electronically to General Editor Richard Hishmeh. For general questions, you can contact Richard Hishmeh ([email protected]).

When submitting a manuscript to http://www.editorialmanager.com/pcp you will first need to create an author profile. The online system will guide you through the steps to upload your article for submission to the editorial office.

Please visit our Submission Guidelines link for more information on how to submit: https://www.pamla.org/pcpsubmissions/

Book Reviews

In the interest of making members’ works more well known to each other and of informing a varied audience of their work, Pacific Coast Philology began a book review section with the 2000 issue of the journal. Members’ works from the last three years are accepted for review. If you have recently published a book that you would like to have the journal review, please contact PCP Book Review Editor Lina Geriguis ([email protected]) with your publication details. 

PAMLA members who are interested in reviewing books for PCP, please also reach out to Lina Geriguis ([email protected]).

Reviewers are enlisted from among scholars of note in the book’s area of expertise and may or may not be PAMLA members.