The beginning of 2022 marks the 50th year of Nationalities Papers and my fourth year as Editor-in-Chief. This is a major anniversary for the Association for the Study of Nationalities, and we plan to celebrate at the next Annual World Convention. Alas, we are still in the midst of a global pandemic, and this editorial is fittingly published in our Special Issue on “Pandemic Nationalism” featuring several COVID-19 related articles, which have been among our most downloaded and read.
In its fifth decade, Nationalities Papers continues to publish research that is both relevant to contemporary debates and at the cutting-edge of various social scientific fields. Examples of the breadth of our multidisciplinary scope include a forthcoming special issue on “The Dynamics of Mass Mobilization in Belarus”, guest edited by Ola Onuch and Gwen Sasse, and the recent winner of the 2021 Huttenbach Prize for best article, “Regional 1932–1933 Famine Losses: A Comparative Analysis of Ukraine and Russia”, by Nataliia Levchuk, Oleh Wolowyna, Omelian Rudnytskyi, Alla Kovbasiuk, and Natalia Kulyk, published in Vol. 48, Issue 3.
The peer-review process remains the foundation of our journal. In 2021, the average of time from submission of an article to a first decision was 74 days. This has been a difficult year for many of our reviewers, some of whom have had to take on additional academic and professional burdens as well as navigating the closures and costs of the pandemic. We cannot thank them enough for their work during this difficult period. They safeguard the quality of the work we publish and provide an invaluable service both to our journal and to their own fields of study, and we list their names in this issue in recognition of their invaluable contributions. Turning to production, articles took on average 87 days to appear online (via FirstView), and an average of 12 months to appear in a print issue during 2021. We are working diligently with Cambridge University Press (CUP), especially our incredible executive publisher Ann Avouris, to improve these statistics by expanding the page budget to print articles in issues more quickly.
In October, Katrina Swartz stepped down as content manager for Nationalities Papers. Katrina has been instrumental in helping us with the transition to Cambridge University Press and in all aspects of its publication, and I want to thank her once again for her tremendous service to the journal. We want to extend a warm welcome to Kayla Riddleberger as our new content manager, and look forward to collaborating further in the new year. Our editorial board has also seen some changes. Our book reviews editor, Roland Spickerman, stepped down after many years of service to our journal, and Jennie Schulze joined our team as the new book review editor in September. We want to thank Roland Spickerman for his great contribution and dedication to the journal and look forward to working with Dr. Schulze. We also welcomed several new editorial board members: Caress Schenk, Mila Dragojević, and Jeff Kopstein.
In these difficult times, we stay in touch with our authors and readers in multiple ways. Our journal’s CUP marketing contact, Jim Ansell, has been critical in this respect, both on social media and through virtual issues on our Cambridge Core page, which we welcome you to explore. In 2021, Nationalities Papers has increased its presence on the revamped ASN website at https://nationalities.org, publishing interviews with authors of State of the Field articles as well as guest editors of special issues. We are active on social media, both on Facebook (@NationalitiesPapers) and Twitter (@NationalitiesP), and encourage you to follow us for news and content from the journal.
Our journal has witnessed and participated in a half century of history and accompanying scholarship, from President Nixon’s China visit to the protests in Belarus against President Alexander Lukashenko. The continuing significance and relevance of the journal to historical and contemporary scholarship on nationalism is a credit to our contributors, reviewers, editorial board, publishers, and staff. On Nationalities Papers’ 50th anniversary I remain confident that we will continue publishing theoretically driven, empirically rich research articles, and shape the field of nationalism studies, broadly understood, for years to come.
