Submissions

Public Seminar is open for submissions. We want to read your personal essays, timely critiques, original reporting, excavations of the archive, and intellectual debate for a wide audience.

If you would like to publish with Public Seminar, please send us a pitch in keeping with the guidelines below. Pitches should be sent to publicseminar@newschool.edu.

Our editorial team reviews all pitches. If your pitch is accepted, you will be assigned an editor, who will work closely with you in preparing the draft for publication.

Public Seminar regrets that we cannot pay authors at this time.

Pitching: A Few Guidelines

Public Seminar serves an informed, non-specialist audience. Your article might be:

• An essay (1,200–1,800 words). An in-depth examination of a topic or text. Examples might be the equivalent of an op-ed, a revised talk given at a conference, a portion of a work in progress, or research paper adapted for a general audience.
• A review (750–1,800 words). Timely critical discussion of a book, movie, television show, website, exhibition—anything that a PS reader would care about and that lies within your field of expertise.
• An interview (1,200–1,800 words).
• A book excerpt (1,200–1,800 words). Selections from new releases or timely reissues. An excerpt may be accompanied by an author interview.
• A news report (800–1,000 words). Be prepared to return revisions quickly.
• A letter (250–1,000 words). Commentaries on breaking events are especially welcome.
• A syllabus. We invite teachers and scholars to publish syllabi that may be of general interest to readers, or that respond to current events. These should be accompanied by a short paragraph that puts the syllabus in context.

Your pitch should be short (a paragraph at most) and should include:

• A first sentence that sums up the article.
• An explanation of the context and the significance of the story.
• Proposed length.
• A brief summary of your credentials. These might include scholarly expertise, personal perspective, or professional experience. In other words, why are you the best person to write this article?

An Important Reminder

Public Seminar serves a well informed, non-expert readership. We are not an academic journal: jargon should be avoided and technical terms should be explained. Please keep a wide audience in mind.

Submitting Your Draft

Once your pitch has been accepted, please observe the following.

• Drafts must be submitted as Microsoft Word documents.
• At the top of the document, please include:
  • Your name. 
  • Your email address.
  • Your preferred title and affiliation, or equivalent one-sentence bio.
  • Relevant social media handles.
• Along with your essay draft, please submit a photo headshot for your Public Seminar author profile.

Editorial

• The standard length of a Public Seminar article is 1,200–1,800 words. We publish long-form articles only occasionally.
• All original work published in Public Seminar is edited and subject to fact-checking: please include links to any source that has informed your work.
• We do not use footnote citations. Please integrate references in the running text; hyperlink to online sources. For references to books, please link to the publisher page, not Amazon.
• Your editor will work with you on setting deadlines. Publication depends on the timely completion of revisions by the author.
• During the editorial process, please use “track changes” to note all revisions.
• Authors may suggest a preferred headline or image; our editors reserve the right to the final decision.
• Public Seminar is not an image-heavy platform. Please check with us before submitting an essay that depends on numerous images or videos. Author must own or obtain the rights to any accompanying media outside instances of fair use.
• Public Seminar does publish reprints, as well as excerpts from recently published and forthcoming books. Publication is contingent on authors demonstrating that they can assign rights or Public Seminar obtaining those rights independently.

Licensing

• All original content published at Public Seminar becomes the property of Public Seminar, subject to a CC BY 4.0 license. This license does not apply to copyrighted material featured courtesy of another publisher, such as journal, blog, or book excerpts and reprints.
• We only remove essays for cause, such as the discovery that an essay is inaccurate, plagiarized, or defamatory. We do not remove essays because the author no longer supports the views they have published on our platform. We do encourage response essays that contribute to debate or reconsider a position with new insight.