Wendy Salmond
Welcome to the second issue of the Journal of Icon Studies (JIS), an annual publication of the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, MA. The Journal is an open-access, peer-reviewed resource for the interdisciplinary study of icons around the globe, from the Byzantine period to the present. It offers an international forum for new scholarship on the history, meaning, and function of icons, their place within a broad cultural and artistic context, and their conservation, collecting, and exhibition.
The move to an online format has been inspired by the example of pioneering publications like the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Nineteenth-Century Art WorldWide, and British Art Studies. We are grateful to our authors for their willingness to publish original scholarship in this digital format. Their contributions demonstrate the exciting potential of icon studies as a sphere of interdisciplinary research. The current issue explores the experiential function of Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo’s Magdalene paintings; the role of icons in the spiritual lives of the Chuvash; Leonid Chupiatov’s religious paintings during the Leningrad Seige; and the contemporary icons of Bulgarian painter Julia Stankova. JIS employs a double-blind peer-review process that relies on the expertise of numerous reviewers. We thank each of these anonymous readers for their generosity. We also thank our book reviewers for taking on the important task of evaluating new publications in the field.
A heartfelt debt of gratitude is due to Mary Delaney for her enthusiastic embrace of creating a new, born-digital format for the Journal and for bringing her elegant design sensibility to the task. Thanks also to our copy editor Melanie Trottier for her expert skills, to Eric Chimenti and the Ideation Lab at Chapman University for scanning help, and to Justine Lim of Chapman’s Leatherby Libraries for help securing image sources. Kent Russell, Director of the Museum of Russian Icons, and the Museum’s Board of Trustees have been enthusiastic supporters of the Journal from the start, and Raoul Smith, its inaugural Editor, a valued mentor. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge JIS’s distinguished Editorial Board, especially Amy Singleton Adams, Elena Boeck, Sarah Pratt, and Vera Shevzov, for their support and guidance.
With this second issue, JIS will apply to be listed with Portico, an electronic archiving service initiated by JSTOR and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, and Library of Congress. After the third issue, scheduled for Fall 2020, we will apply to ISI Web of Knowledge, a database run by Thompson Reuters. In the meantime, we are posting articles to academia.edu and will make every effort to ensure the recognition and distribution of our authors’ work. Our membership in CrossRef allows us to register each article with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that provides a persistent link to its location on the Internet. All JIS articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) License.
We invite you to consider JIS as a venue for your own publications. In addition to longer scholarly articles, we welcome translations of primary sources and seminal texts of interest to a broader readership; shorter pieces on museum and private collections and on individual icons; and book and exhibition reviews.
The submission deadline for volume 3, to appear in Fall 2020, is December 1, 2019, although we welcome submissions at any time.