Paul Mokrzycki, 27, a doctoral student and graduate instructor in the department of history at the University of Iowa, is editor in chief of the Middle West Review, a new interdisciplinary journal focused on the American Midwest. Here is his account of the effort to create that journal, as told to Mary Bowerman.
In the summer of 2013, I worked on a research project about two Iowa paperboys who went missing in the 1980s. I kept coming across language that seemed to be anchored to a Midwestern view, or consciousness. As a cultural historian, I wanted to situate the findings within a broader context of regional identity. But I found little scholarly research on the Midwest, as compared to other regions.
More specifically, very few historians consider themselves scholars of the American Midwest, while Southern and Western studies both remain vibrant fields. Even those who conduct research on race riots in, say, Chicago or Detroit generally don’t locate their findings within “the Midwest” as a region. Conversely, you simply couldn’t talk about Atlanta, Charlotte, or Birmingham without placing those cities within “the South.”
To address the lack of scholarship interrogating Midwestern culture, history, and identity, I began a blog dedicated to the subject in December 2013.
I started posting short think pieces, and faculty at the University of Iowa and other Midwestern colleges showed an interest in my project. Catherine Cocks, an editor at the University of Iowa Press, put me in touch with Jon K. Lauck, a lawyer, history professor, and chairman of the Midwestern History Working Group, who had just published a book that called for the revival of Midwestern history.
We—along with Shannon Murray, a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary, and others—started to collaborate and decided to elevate the project from a blog to a peer-reviewed digital journal called the Middle West Review. We spent hours assembling an editorial board, simply by emailing scholars from around the country.
It’s a perfect example of how the Internet has changed things within the academy. Twenty years ago, we couldn’t have put together such a wonderful board so quickly.
In April 2014, days before the inaugural digital issue of the journal was to go live, Manjit Kaur, from the University of Nebraska Press, reached out to us and asked if we were interested in producing a print journal.
The editorial board agreed that a conventionally published journal would legitimate the project and enable it to reach a wide scholarly audience. We had to rework the content, so the publishing date was pushed to September 2014, and the first issue came out then. The ultimate goal is to someday supplement what appears in print with digital and multimedia components.
We are currently considering submissions for the April issue. We aren’t interested in works that champion the image of the innocent “heartland” or promote the idea that the Midwest is a quaint, transhistorical “place out of time.” Rather, we are interested in scholarship that looks at the Midwestern past and present in critical ways, the ways that have advanced our understanding of the South, the West, the Northeast, and the nation.