The Historian

Guide for Authors

Submissions for The Historian are welcome from all staff, students, and friends of the School of History at QMUL.

Types of Post

All posts should reflect the life of the School of History at QMUL.  In particular, we welcome posts that fall within the following broad categories:

• Reviews (of books, exhibitions, movies, TV programmes, etc.)
• Interviews (either in text, audio or video format)
• Reflections on
  • current events from a historical perspective
  • teaching at QMUL
  • studying history at QMUL
  • any aspect of historical research (projects completed or in progress)

Republishing

The Historian is an Open-Access resource.  All material published on this site is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs licence.  This means that others are free to re-publish anything here on their site or elsewhere, whether that site is for-profit or commercial.  If you are interested in republishing our material, please follow our re-publishing and attribution guide.

Authors are exempt from this license as it applies to their own material.  Authors are free to re-use in whole or in part content published under their name in any format or publication, without any restriction.  A citation or attribution link is always welcome, but not required.

What to submit

Your submission should be about 700-1000 words long.  In addition to the text itself, your submission should include:

• Your article’s title as you would like it to appear on the site.  This should be short and punchy; a title of more than ten words is too long.
• A short teaser for your article of around seventy words.  We will use this on the site front page, and anywhere that your article is included in an archive.
• Biographical information comprising:
  • Your name as you wish us to publish it, including any titles. (We will not use your title in the article byline, but it will be included in your author biography.)
  • Your role within the School (e.g. Doctoral Candidate, Undergraduate Student in History, Professor of Early Modern History, E-Strategy Manager)
  • A short biography of around three sentences, describing your work and anything else you would like readers to know.  This biography should not include any links.
  • Your Twitter handle, if you have one and would like us to publish it.
  • The address of your personal or professional blog or website, if you have one and would like us to link to it.
• A photograph of you, face-on, suitable for use in a square profile picture.  This should not have any other people in it, and should if possible have been taken against a plain background.  If you do not have a suitable photo, please get in touch and we can take one for you.
• The category under which your article should be posted, and between five and ten suggested keyword tags
• An image that we can use to illustrate your post and as a feature image on the front page of the blog. This image must be copyright-cleared or copyright-free.

Style Guide

Above all, you should write in your own voice.  When writing about events or activities that the author has taken part in the first person singular is preferred; the third person singular may be more appropriate for co-authored posts of this type.  Our aim is to represent the rich and diverse range of and work going on within the School of History at QMUL through a diversity of voices, so we have sought to avoid prescriptive guidelines.  This said, we have provided some pointers below.

Your Text

• You can use contractions like don’t, won’t, can’t, haven’t and shouldn’t.
• Footnotes are to be avoided if possible.  Instead, try to make use of in-text links or asides (see below).
• Link wherever possible.  The best way of writing links in for web copy is to link relevant terms to the page in question.  There are many online guides to doing this, for example the Luther College Web Style Guide.
• If you wish to include asides within your text, please mark them up as follows: [aside: some relevant text].  We will convert these to clickable notes.
• If you are describing something, please provide a link to it.
• Avoid jargon which is specific to your sub-discipline, where possible, and explain these terms where their use is unavoidable.

Imagery and other media

• We encourage you to supply images, including a ‘feature’ image for the header of your article.
• We will consider embedding video, audio and other media on a case-by-case basis.  Where this material is not essential to understanding the text, we will link to it on an external site.
• Any media published on the blog needs to be licenced for reproduction on our site. If you are unable to ascertain whether images you want to include are licenced for reproduction, include a source link and we will determine this for you.

Formatting

As a general rule, we prefer submissions to contain as little formatting as possible.  Complex formatting on the web is difficult to preserve consistently.  Beyond the formatting detailed below, avoid further styling.

• Feel free to use headings.  We will not differentiate between different levels of sub-headings and so these distinctions will be removed from your text if they are used.
• Bold can be used for emphasis.
• Italics should be used for words in foreign languages and titles of publications.  Website titles do not need to be italicised – instead they should be linked.
• Underline should be avoided at all costs and is likely to be stripped from your text.  On the web, underlining indicates to readers that the text in question is a link, and underlined text that is not a link is likely to confuse.
• Numbered and un-numbered lists, tables, etc. are acceptable.

Making your Submission

All submissions should be sent to: Chris Sparks