Submissions

We want to publish your best work. And our editorial process will honor your voice. Souls has room for your ruthless critique; crystalline historiography; relentless data-driven political-economic analysis; poetic expression; philosophical exegesis; airless erudition; rich instructive ethnography; critical music playlists; paradigm-shifting video/film; meticulous close reading, and imaginative lyrical theorization—all in the same offering, or works set alongside one another (as Toni Morrison insists we situate our stories). Show us how you and/or your conversation partners see this world and imagine other worlds—in visual art, sound, poetry, short stories, and personal essays. Dazzle us with archival finds, interviews, conference proceedings, and translations that few have seen or heard. Advocate new ways to teach, learn, sense, and organize. All these offerings “like bread in our children’s mouths... .”[i] Souls stages conversations that impel (re)action, movement, feeling, and invested thought, including and beyond the “academic.” So, yes—a “re-grounding” of Black Studies, as our original statement affirmed. Together. This Souls is a collective project. On this shore and across new terrains and seas. Imaginatively de-territorialized and at the same time keenly aware that one must ‘be’ somewhere: ‘stay’ somewhere, making demands and sometimes cultivating on rocky or toxic soils. Moving, as a luta continua.

Submission Guidelines

The Souls editorial office will be the first to receive the gift of your submitted work. Please be sure to compose your abstract in a way that will help us understand how the work contributes to the conversation and our wider project. As ever, Souls is an intellectual intervention that seeks to inform and transform Black life and history. While all beautifully told stories, fascinating unearthed facts, and well-wrought art are valuable and significant, when we receive your work, our editorial collective will ask, after Sylvia Wynter, what does this work (hope to) do?[ii] What is (are) the intervention(s)?

Your rich citational infrastructure and illuminating endnotes contribute to the conversational quality of Souls. The editorial office encourages this rigorous practice of gratitude and transparency about your methods, archives, and analytic approaches. We want you to ‘show your work’ as you add to the unbroken transgenerational conversation. Consequently, please submit endnotes and footnotes for your submission.

Languages

The editorial office is happy to receive submissions of works written in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Haitian Kreyol, and other languages. We must ask that authors provide a fulsome abstract written in English and expect a longer time to review relative to works in English (until we reach multilingual capacity). Each volume of Souls will feature a work originally written in a language other than English. We are interested in both foundational works that monolingual English readers may have “missed” and reflections on the state of Black Study(ies) from those writing in languages other than English.

Structure & Process

All submitted works undergo editorial office review and peer review, with the option of an open mentorship-review workshop process, initiated to develop the next generation of scholars and artists and to connect across generations, disciplines, and geographies. Special section proposals will likewise undergo an open mentorship-review workshop process, as well as expedited anonymous review by members of our Editorial Board. The editorial office aims to render a final decision on all reviews within ten weeks.

In the case of review essays and other works designated for commentary, the editorial office will commission interlocutors, to which the author will be asked to respond before publication of the edited conversation.

The editorial office will sometimes determine that a submission is not for us. This may occur as soon as the work is submitted to the Souls office (desk pass) within ten days or via the peer review process (pass). In all cases, we will tell you why we have decided to pass and will make suggestions for other outlets or reconceptualization.

Guidelines:

• Single spaced
• Times New Roman, 12 Point Font
• Include an abstract and keywords in the body of your work
• Provide Chicago Style footnotes and endnotes

Please register for our online portal at https://ojs.soulsjournal.org/ and submit your manuscript via our online portal. All submissions sent to our email address will not be considered for publication.

While we are currently not accepting submissions to the Journal, we will begin accepting submissions on November 1st, 2026. Read the following Call For Papers for more information.

Call For Papers: VOCATION

Vocation descends from the Latin vocatio — a calling, a summons, a being called — from vocare, to call, and beneath that, vox: voice. To have a vocation is to have been called and to have answered in a voice of one's own. The institution's counter-word hides in the same root: avocation. Literally being called-away — the hobby, the distraction, the thing that does not count. Administrivia. Or, the summons of whole lifetimes, treated as a mere
avocation — tolerated, underfunded, and first to be called away when budgets and politics demand.

The moment presses. Departments dissolved or “consolidated,” curricula legislated against, archives and offices under threat, a Librarian of Congress fired outright, and high-principled resignations from hard-won seats of policy and academic influence. What does it mean to keep faith with a calling when the institutions that housed it will not?

SOULS invites you to create, with us and colleagues across the globe, an unbroken accounting of vocation in Black Study(ies). The field, and the rich wide ground beneath it.

What is vocation as Black people have lived, practiced, and theorized it across politics, cultures, and societies? Illustrate, critique, and contextualize — historic and contemporary examples of those who do the exacting, sometimes uncredentialed, often unpaid or poorly paid work of mastery and transmission. Black Study is one calling among many; initiated by the fugitive, collective habits of independent scholars and artists who built Black Study before Black Studies had a department to house it; and those who, within the house, maintain fidelity to why and for whom they came. Is it worth it? Time to try
something new?

Ours is a rhizome, not a family tree: no single root, but a long tradition that spreads laterally and sends up shoots wherever it can, the seminar room being only one such shoot. Autodidacts and the exclusively HBCU-trained. Business managers turned faculty, faculty turned managers. The stalwart volunteer, the church soloist who never missed a Sunday, the usher and the sexton, the unmatched pound cake baker — so-called ordinary Black people who were called to what they did and did it with extraordinary preparation, dedication, and effect. Poet to Imam. Ballers, gardeners, preachers, healers, braiders,
inventors, teachers, scientists, conjurers. Arturo Schomburg, turning a private parlor into a public institution. And duty — the vocation of working-class Black civic life: the lodge and the union, the block association, the church board; the committee women who keep the institutions standing when nothing else will, and the Club Women, stunting on them in uninterrupted white, making national policy. This is the tradition we want held to account: rarely paid what it is worth, never confined to a CV.

We also want the argument against vocation: how the language of calling is used and abused — not only in the neoliberal university but across the late capitalist moment — under what bell hooks named “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”: calling as a wage-suppression device. Devotion as a management technique.

And we can hear the difference between a calling and a career move: the hot take posing as real work, the huckster who has learned to sound called — vocation drag, worn to be recognized and paid. We cannot celebrate vocation without faithfully interrogating it.

Vocation, for us, is inseparable from mentorship and training — how one generation hands its fine techniques, canons, and survival instructions to the next. We want to know how this field communicates those stakes to those coming up. This is SOULS work: ours together.

Lines of Inquiry (among many possible)
We want the particular. General theory will find little purchase here without a case: bring us the named figure, the specific institution, the local fight, the single practice read deeply.

One might work the data and the policy record on the Black women purged from the federal workforce since 2025; another might sit with a single lifework — a figure like Gloria Rolando, making cinema in Havana for forty years. Is art a ‘vocation’, or something older than the word — a ritual function, or the gift that obligates? What does the Protestant genealogy of “calling” fail to hear in Black creative and spiritual practice? Bring us, for example, fieldwork among the quilombola organizers of one Brazilian municipality. Oral history with the last of the granny midwives, credentialed by no one and indispensable to everyone. Legal analysis of the braiders' long fight against state licensing regimes. Close
listening to a choir director's fifty years of two Sunday services and midweek rehearsals; close looking at what a curator, an archivist, a studio practice holds together that no institution would. A deep dive into the file cabinets of keepers of archives for which no repository ever asked; or Dorothy Porter at Howard, classifying Black life across the whole of human knowledge when the standard system refused.

We welcome your best scholarship, art, activist reflection, policy analysis, film, archival and curatorial practice that takes up any part of this — in any language, in any form.

Sections & Formats

• Genre and length only — the thematic scope above applies across all.
• Multimedia and other work not suited to peer review may run in Dispatches from the Ebony Tower.
• Essays — 4,000–8,000 words. Critical, historiographical, theoretical, and/or empirical.
• Short-Form Provocations — 1,500–3,000 words. Position pieces, polemics, critical dispatches.
• Profiles & Interviews — length varies by format; query if unsure.
  Creative Work — poetry, visual art, short film, curatorial statements.
• Memoria — brief tributes, length open.
• A small number of Featured Conversations — commissioned roundtables and interviews with elders and students of the field — will anchor this volume. That track is being developed directly by the editors and is not open for general pitches, but if you have a specific intergenerational pairing in mind, propose it.
  

Multilingual Submissions
Each Souls volume features work originally composed in a language other than English. We welcome submissions in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Haitian Kreyol, and others, with a full English-language abstract. Non-English submissions should expect additional review time.

How to Submit
https://www.soulsjournal.org/submissions

Timeline
Open call begins: November 1, 2026
Submission deadline: January 1, 2027
Publication window: January 2028

Email us at souls@columbia.edu for any clarification. We are happy to receive your submissions via our editorial portal at https://ojs.soulsjournal.org/. We do not accept submissions via email.

Open Access Statement:

SOULS is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.

Plagiarism Screening Statement:

SOULS employs the use of iThenticate to screen all submissions upon receipt for plagiarism. If an article is revealed to be plagiarized material, the editorial team will automatically desk reject the paper.

Copyright and Licensing Policy:

SOULS utilizes a CC-BY-NC license for all materials published by our publication. That includes but is not limited to, The SOULS Journal, Dispatches From The Ebony Tower, and any video or photo material we may product.

This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator (SOULS Journal and the author). It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only.

For more information regarding this policy, please consult the Creative Commons site.

Repository Policy:

The “Repository Policy” refers to the policy of the authors of journal articles when they make them available on the internet, such as in institutional repositories. SOULS decided on the following policy:

Articles Used
Only the publisher’s final version, which are post-peer review papers, are allowed to be used. The use of the final version of the author’s paper and the pre-peer review version are not permitted. However, until the publisher’s final version is published, the publisher’s advance online publication version (the version with a cover page showing the date of receipt, date of acceptance, DOI, etc. on the author’s final manuscript) may be used. It must be replaced when the publisher’s final published version is released.

Permitted sites

• Institutional repositories that are operated by domestic and foreign universities and non-profit research institutions.
• Websites of research funding organizations that have provided support for the research of this article.
• Author’s Web site.
• Non-commercial online thesis archives.

Terms of use
The copyright holder, source and DOI must also be indicated. For example of copyright notice, “© 2025 SOULS Journal”.

Article Processing and Submission Fees:

Authors will not incur any fees to publish their work in SOULS. We do not charge article processing or submission fees for those who choose to submit their work to SOULS.

Submission Guidelines:

Our online submission system is the only acceptable means of submitting a manuscript for review. Manuscripts sent directly to the editors will not be considered for publication. If you encounter any technical difficulties, please contact us at souls@columbia.edu for assistance.

Formatting, Citations, and Images:

Our Editorial Team utilizes the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed., 2017) for most matters of style, including hyphenation, capitalization, punctuation, abbreviations, and grammar, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed., 2003) for spelling. Manuscripts must be double-spaced and in a 12-point font, preferably Times New Roman; this applies to block quotes and excerpts, notes, and references. Margins throughout the manuscript should be set at 1 inch.

Citations and reference lists should use Chicago’s author-date format. Sources appearing in the references list must be cited in text and vice versa. In text, references are cited in parentheses, with last name(s), year of publication, and page numbers for direct quotations. The references list should be ordered alphabetically by author’s last name. If possible, please provide digital object identifier (DOIs) for all journal articles.

Images should not be embedded in your manuscript, but uploaded separately. In the manuscript, please indicate where you would like each image to appear by adding in-text callouts between paragraphs: for example, “<IMAGE 1 HERE>.” Then, once you have uploaded the manuscript to OJS, you should upload the images and a Word document with captions for each image as supplementary files.

Editorial and Production Process:

SOULS employs both editorial review as well as double anonymous peer review for all submissions, and we require a minimum of two blind peer reviews to consider a manuscript for publication. If we deem that your submission requires substantial revisions, we reserve the right to enter another round of peer review for the submission.

Once an article has been accepted and scheduled for publication, it will be copyedited for clarity and consistency with SOULS’s house style. Authors will have the opportunity to review the copyedited manuscript and to make additional changes, in consultation with the managing editor. Once an article has been typeset, only very small corrections will be permitted. Authors are expected to respond promptly to all inquiries from the editorial office in order to avoid delays in the production schedule.

SOULS requires authors to provide the journal with their ORCID identifier early in the production process.