Journal of Transnational American Studies

The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) is an open-access peer-reviewed online journal that seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary study of American cultures in transnational contexts.

Founded in 2009 by Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Stanford), Shirley Geok-lin Lim (UC-Santa Barbara), Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University), and Alfred Hornung (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz), JTAS functions as a forum for Americanists in the global academic community, where scholars are increasingly interrogating borders both within and outside the nation and focusing on the multiple intersections and exchanges that flow across those borders. JTAS is a critical conduit for bringing together innovative transnational work from diverse but often disconnected sites in the US and abroad. It features a range perspectives from across the disciplines—including cultural studies, literature, history, film and new media, visual arts, performance studies, music, religion, politics, and law—in work that often engages issues of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class. Contributors have included multimedia artists, filmmakers, photographers, poets, novelists, and curators, as well as scholars.   

The journal is sponsored by Stanford's Program in American Studies and UC Santa Barbara's American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, and is supported by the UC-Davis Department of American Studies and Department of English.  Since the journal’s founding in 2009, Stanford’s Program in American Studies has been its editorial home. Starting in 2021, JTAS will add a new co-sponsor and a second editorial home: the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany.

JTAS is published by the University of California Digital Library.  In order to facilitate the broadest possible cultural conversation about transnational American Studies, JTAS is available without cost to anyone with access to the internet. Notably, the Library of Congress has selected JTAS as one of a handful of online journals to be housed in the Library's permanent archive of electronic publications. 

JTAS has a unique format that features new essays by emerging and established scholars alongside:

  • The Forward section of the journal, which presents excerpts from newly published books or forthcoming studies that signal important developments and directions in transnational American Studies;
  • The Reprise section, which reprints difficult-to-obtain critical works in transnational American Studies (previously published in hard copy only) that merit a global readership online;
  • And guest-edited Special Forums, which engage transnational American studies from a particular focus.  (Past topics include: "Circa 1898: Overseas Empire and Transnational American Studies"; "Charting Transnational Native American Studies"; "Redefining the American in Asian American Studies"; "Revolutions and Heterotopias"; "American Studies: Caribbean Edition"; "Sweden and America"; "La Floride Française"; "Globalization and American Literature"; "Transnational Black Politics and Resistance"; "Archipelagoes/Oceans/American Visuality"; and more.)

The autumn issue of JTAS each year publishes an excerpt from work by that year’s  winner of the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies – an award that the American Studies Association created in 2019 to honor professor Fishkin’s “outstanding dedication to the field.” 

JTAS has published hundreds of pieces of scholarship by individuals based in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Guam, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Macao, Malasia, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sāmoa, Sāmoa Amelika (American Samoa), Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S.  

The journal’s Editorial Board includes scholars from across the US as well as from Canada, Germany and Japan. Current Associate Managing Editors come from China, Germany, Turkey, and the U.S.  The journal’s Advisory Board  includes scholars from  Argentina, Australia, China, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Morocco, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S.  JTAS has provided Stanford graduate students in English, History, and Modern Thought and Literature with professional development opportunities as Associate Managing Editors, as well as providing research opportunities for Stanford undergraduates.  

 Read the latest Journal of Transnational American Studies on eScholarship

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