Visual Studies – Embarking on a New Era

Fellow Visualistas,

I hope this message finds you doing as well as possible in this age of proximity distancing, pervasive uncertainty, and social reorganization. I don’t know about you, but in these emotionally taxing times, I’m particularly happy to be the sender or recipient of comparatively good news (or, to be honest, any news that isn’t about COVID-19).

And so it’s my great pleasure to announce the wonderful and exciting news that our esteemed interdisciplinary journal, Visual Studies, has a whole new editorial team in place!!!!

As many of you already know, earlier this year our former Editor-in-Chief, Tim Shortell, was regrettably forced to resign the position due to personal reasons. Following his resignation, we developed a bold new plan for completely reorganizing and staffing the journal. Rather than having a single Chief Editor, our vision was to recruit and hire a diverse and dynamic team of Editors to collaborate, consult and work as a highly effective and democratically organized operation.

Last week we actualized the new vision for Visual Studies by finalizing the staffing arrangement and holding our first-ever meeting in the new era. Our editorial team, which is organized non-hierarchically, now consists of the following scholars:
 
Derek Conrad Murray, Co-Editor
Gary Bratchford, Co-Editor
Julie Patarin-Jossec, Specialist Editor: Special Issues and Book Reviews
John Grady, Specialist Editor: Film/Video and Multimedia
Susan Hansen, Specialist Editor: Visual Essays and Images

Please join me in congratulating these scholars on becoming members of the newly reconfigured editorial team for Visual Studies!

In the interval between Tim’s resignation and last week’s inauguration of the new team, longtime IVSA member and Visual Studies multimedia editor John Grady very capably served as the interim Editor-in-Chief. John kept the journal running and made great strides in implementing a number of efficiency measures to improve the journal’s capacity and operations. For this herculean effort, we all owe John a debt of gratitude. Thank you, John!

I also want to give a big thanks to the members of the Visual Studies subcommittee of the IVSA Board. On a very short timeline they carefully reviewed all of the incoming applications and advised on difficult organizational restructuring and staffing decisions.

A final word of special thanks goes to all of the wonderfully talented scholars who applied but ultimately were not selected for a position on the editorial team. The final decisions were very difficult indeed, and we hope that all of you will accept our warm invitation to get involved with VS in other ways.
  
Thank you all for your continued involvement in and support of IVSA. All of us at IVSA and Visual Studies wish you peace, health, and love. Please contact me directly (gscott@depaul.edu) if you have questions or if we can do anything for you.

Warmly,
Greg Scott
IVSA President