The CARMEN Visual and Material Cultures

This series provides a platform for interdisciplinary medieval scholarship centred on visual and material cultures, through which it seeks to gain new perspectives and bring greater depth to existing historical narratives of the medieval world. Drawing on methodologies from a variety of disciplines – archaeology, art history, history, and anthropology more generally – this series provides new ways of thinking about the medieval world with an emphasis on the material expression of the lived embodied experience of medieval people.

Together with my wonderful colleagues Karen Dempsey and Elizabeth Dospel Williams, I am on its editorial board. As editors we are always looking for publications (conceptualized or almost realized) related to visual and/or material culture in the long Middle Ages. In this email, I briefly explain why our series might be of interest to you or your colleagues.

CARMEN Visual and Material Cultures offers an exciting opportunity to publish something different, to try out an idea that has been on your mind, to experiment. Filling out our book proposal form is straightforward, and we aim to inform authors about their submissions as soon as possible. We are invested in reading proposals and chapters seriously and finding you suitable peer reviewers.

Arc is very committed to Open Access, and views it as a key aspect in how scholars' work is disseminated with a global footprint and as a way to navigate some of the restrictions of the current climate in order to ensure that research can be accessed immediately, online and for free. This is something I have experience in myself. In 2020, I published my OA book with Arc and between May and July my book was downloaded more than 1400 times, which I think is a lot.

The press has developed an attractive hybrid model, which sees an online edition available immediately worldwide, alongside short-run hardbacks for libraries and affordable paperbacks appear 6-8 months later, so all audiences are catered for. While there is a cost associated with OA, the onus is on institutional funding and subventions from organisations rather than the scholar (in my case the Humboldt-Universität funded my book). Of course I am aware that not all institutions have such resources, but Arc will support authors in finding funding. More details about OA publishing at Arc can be found at: https://arc-humanities.org/digital/.

Finally, Arc works with experienced and engaged copy-editors, an invaluable service not provided by all academic publishers.

Interested authors should contact Jitske Jasperse (jitskeja@hotmail.com) or the acquisition editor Claire Hopkins (claire.hopkins@arc-humanities.org).