History faculty help shape the field by editing and supporting several leading academic journals. These publications span digital scholarship, regional studies, and innovative research across multiple areas of history. Together, they highlight the department’s global reach and commitment to advancing new approaches to studying the past.
Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation
The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP) is a digital academic journal that publishes datasets and accompanying data articles about the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation builds from and expands upon the pioneering digital scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. As such, the journal elevates curated data to a first-class publication status, providing scholarly review, recognition, and credit to those who undertake the intellectual work involved in generating, cleaning, contextualizing, and describing digital records relating to bondage and freedom in Africa and the diaspora.
REGION, Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia
REGION is a peer-reviewed international journal that explores the history and current political, economic, and social affairs of the entire former Soviet bloc. In particular, the journal focuses on various facets of transformation at the local and national levels in the aforementioned regions, as well as the changing character of their relationships with the rest of the world in the context of globalization, a perspective that stresses both local adaptation to global phenomena and that adaptation’s transnational or even global significance. The journal began publication in 2012 and appears biannually. Its managing editor is Joonseo Song (Ph.D., MSU 2005) and its editor-in-chief is Professor Emeritus Lewis Siegelbaum.
Journal of West African History
JWAH is a new interdisciplinary peer-reviewed research journal that will publish articles on West African history. Located at the cutting edge of new scholarship on the social, cultural, economic, and political history, JWAH will fill a representational gap by providing a forum for serious scholarship and debate on women and gender, sexuality, slavery, oral history, popular and public culture, and religion. The editorial board encourages authors to explore a wide range of topical, theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives in new and exciting ways. Michigan State University Press publishes the JWAH in collaboration with the MSU African Studies Center and the History Department, and the founding editor-in-chief is Nwando Achebe..
