Submit

Thank you for your interest in Public Seminar. We are open for submissions: pitch us essays, reviews, research, visions of the future, and critiques of the classics.


General Submissions

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). 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. Be prepared to return revisions quickly
  • 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;
  • Three to six sentences that explain the context and the significance of the story;
  • Proposed length;
  • A brief summary of your experience. In other words, why are you the person to write the story?

Submitting Your Draft

Once your pitch has been accepted, please observe the following in submitting and editing your draft.

  • Submissions must be in Microsoft Word.
  • Authors must submit a short (one-sentence) bio, a headshot, and, if applicable, a social media handle.
  • Essays and reviews should be 1,200–1,800 words and written for a general audience. We publish long-form articles only occasionally.
  • All work published in Public Seminar is edited and subject to fact-checking: please include hyperlink to any source that has informed your work. We do not use footnote citations.
  • Public Seminar is not an image-heavy platform. Please check with us before submitting an essay that depends on numerous images or videos.
  • 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.
  • Your editor will work with you on setting deadlines. Publication of submissions depends on the timely completion of revisions by the author.
  • Authors may suggest a title or subtitle, but Public Seminar reserves the right to choose titles and feature images.

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 publish images to which we have legal rights.
  • 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.