summer 2025 greetings from Insurrect!
there is a lot going on, but we have recently published some exciting new work AND we have some good news to share
Dear Insurrect! Readers and Supporters,
We are writing as editorial and advisory board members with a brief update on the happenings at Insurrect!
We recently published a few exciting new essays:
This summer we published an essay by Sarah Pawlicki, A Transgressive Revolution: America 250 and the Public Universal Friend on the barriers to narrating queer and trans public history in our current moment of white nationalism and transphobia. Pawlicki’s insight that the Public Universal Friend’s history “stands in opposition to the present moment’s embrace of homogeneity, uniformity, and incurious oversimplification” is especially needed as we face openly fascist attempts at historical narration by the current administration.
Alicia Prainito, our former 2024 summer intern, recently published Who Tells Your Story? Philip Schuyler’s Legacy of Enslavement and Freedom Beyond Hamilton. The essay takes as its starting point the Broadway show Hamilton to address narratives of freedom and its limits.
Fallon Murphy, the new digital content editor for Insurrect!, recently published Is Repair Possible in the University Museum? a personal essay on reimagining repair and reparative histories when conserving a death mask commissioned by Louis Agassiz at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. We are thrilled that Fallon as joined our editorial team.
We also have a few exciting publications in the pipeline that we are looking forward to sharing with you later this summer, so follow us here or on bluesky or instagram.
In good news: we are raising our rates! Insurrect! is excited to announce that we are raising our rates for writers and editors, in part because of the increasing lack of humanities funding for junior scholars and graduate students in our current moment. Under the new rates, our writers will now receive an honorarium of $150 for short pieces of writing and $200 for longer essays. Our content editors will receive an honorarium of $150 per article and style editors $100 per article. This shift is part of our vision of editorial work as indispensable intellectual labor.
Thank you to our recent donors: We want to give a special shout-out to our wonderful Patreon supporters. Even a monthly donation of $3 helps us mentor graduate students and pay early career scholars for their writing, and helps us continue to raise our rates. If you are not currently contributing to our Patreon but would like to support us with a monthly donation, follow this link for membership options.
Open Call for Writers/New CFP: Insurrect! is currently seeking submissions from contingent scholars, graduate students, and scholars working outside the formal channels of the academy. Feel free to reach out if you have suggestions of topics on which you would like to see Insurrect! publish. Please see our CFP for “Imagining Survival” (more details below).
Insurrect’s Statement on Academic Freedom: As students and faculty around the world face retaliation for, among other things, protesting genocide, scholasticide, and settler colonial violence in Palestine, the editors of Insurrect! remain committed to academic freedom and continue to welcome submissions in any relevant research area. If our mission involves the unflinching analysis of settler colonialism in the past, it must also support open discussions about colonial and racial violence in our present moment, as well as its ramifications for learning, creativity, and cultural work for all scholars across borders.
Insurrect’s Statement on Attacks on Higher Education and the NEH: We write in solidarity with fellow public humanists, tenured and untenured scholars and teachers, and students who have been affected by the large-scale dismantling of research funding, including humanities programs, by the current administration. We also commend our colleagues who have been attending rallies, organizing campaigns, and finding ways to work together in response to these attacks across the country. Check out Higher Education Labor United for updates on this national organizing.
Pedagogical Invite: Are you teaching a pre-1900 Atlantic world related class in 2025-2026 and want some ideas about how to incorporate Insurrect! or public facing writing into your classroom? Reach out to us and we can workshop ideas together! We are available at <insurrect.history@gmail.com> to think through undergraduate or graduate digital scholarship and pedagogy.
Relatedly: if you have taught an Insurrect! article, we would love to hear from you!
Sending our supporters cooling thoughts for the remaining weeks of summer,
The Insurrect! Editorial Team
New CFP: Imagining Survival
In our current moment, a firehose of laws have sought to delegitimize welfare and its capacities. Many lives and ways of living are becoming more vulnerable to displacement, chaos, imperialist violence, and fascism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theory of state violence and surveillance through “organized abandonment” could not be more prescient. More lives are forced into precarity, while, at the same time, power and wealth move further to an even more elite group. Under the pressure of state violence and the retraction of welfare, collective survival is difficult to imagine.
We are soliciting authors to submit short essays for the roundtable Imagining Survival. We are interested in proposals that document how an individual or group expresses the emotions of survival in the pre-1900 Americas and Atlantic World. Specifically, we seek to publish reflections on possible ways to understand our current crisis as an afterlife of the past. We are especially interested in submissions from public historians, scholars, and artists to write on the possibilities and limits of communal care, solidarity, and courage within the present. We encourage contributors to be attentive to how some of the aforementioned terms are often used in reductive ways and encourage nuanced interpretations of survival.
Roundtables are written dialogues between three to four writers, such as this recent roundtable on Mutual Aid, which this call builds on. Each completed submission will be 500–1,000 words. Compensation for each contribution is $150.
Please submit completed drafts, along with a few sentences on your personal, academic, or professional interest on the topic, by July 20th, with acceptances sent the following two weeks; to insurrect.history@gmail.com and copy fallonm@bu.edu. Please carefully consult our style guide before submitting. The completed roundtable will appear in Insurrect! in the late summer or early fall.
Beyond the Pages of Insurrect!
Alanna Prince is an incoming postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Congratulations to Alanna on this achievement, and also on graduating with a PhD from Northeastern University in spring 2025!
Elise A. Mitchell is a co-primary investigator on the digital project, Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya, under the leadership of Dr. Sophia Monegro. The Cimarronas team was recently awarded Digital Justice Seed Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya is a digital platform that narrates the early modern histories of ten Black women across the Indigenous island of Ayiti, today’s Republic of Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
Liz Polcha and Ittai Orr recently shared their research at the Society of Early Americanists conference on a panel titled “Atlantic World Intimacies,” with the support of Kimberly Takahata as chair. Liz and Kimberly also have articles in a June 2025 special issue of American Literature on “The Epistemological Turn in Early American Literary Studies” co-edited by Ralph Bauer and Alex Mazzafero.
Fallon Murphy received the Leonard and Louise Riggio Fellowship at Emory University for the project, "To Be a Walking Filing Cabinet": Alice Walker's Preservation Practices as Poetry. She has also received an Editorial Fellowship for the digital project at the University of Houston, Sharing Stories from 1977: Putting the National Women’s Conference on the Map.
Many Insurrect! readers, writers, editors, and supporters have connections to the University of Pennsylvania (mainly through our editorial meeting ground, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies). With this in mind, we are excited for the upcoming union election for Penn postdoctoral fellows and research associates on July 16 and 17, and we are sending thoughts of solidarity and best wishes to the postdocs. We believe that we will win!