Please contact the Book Review Editor, Clayton Fordahl, at cfordahl@memphis.edu if you are interested in reviewing a book for Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.

A review should be headed with a bibliographic citation for the book including the author, title, location of publication, publisher, date, pages and price, in line with the following example:

Marc S. Abramson, Ethnic Identity in Tang China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, 288 pp., 36.00 hbk.).

Reviewers should aim to provide short, accessible and authoritative reviews which strike a balance between providing a non-evaluative overview of the content of the book and a critical evaluation. The overview part should take up a much larger proportion of the book review (roughly 70-80%) compared to the critical evaluation part (roughly 20-30%). SEN reserves the right to reject book reviews if they do not adhere to our journal’s standards.

Reviews for non-edited volumes should be between 600 and 800 words in length. Reviews for edited volumes can be up to 1,000 words in length. Use Arial in 10 point and double spacing throughout the body of the text. Do not indent the start of each paragraph, but do leave a single space after each one. Footnotes are not used in reviews. Instead please include a citation in the text itself, followed by a full reference at the end of the review in the Harvard style. All quotations from the book reviewed should be followed by the page number from which they have been taken; for example, (p. 34). For more details on SEN’s referencing style, please see this page.

The placement of commas in quotations should follow standard usage, except that end punctuation goes outside the quotation marks when the passage is not a full sentence, inside when the passage is a full sentence. Abbreviations, acronyms and technical terms should be explained in the text the first time they occur. Quotations should be enclosed within ‘single’ quotation marks. Substantial quotations should be indented without quotation marks. Quotations within a quotation should be enclosed within “double” quotation marks. Any alteration in a quotation should be acknowledged, for example: (Jones 1990:20-1, emphasis added).

Foreign language text should always be italicised. Only British spelling should be used. Spelling practice ought to be consistent throughout the article. Proper nouns should have Capital Letters according to standard practice and the author’s wishes as long as continuity is maintained throughout the submission. For clarity, the following should be used as a guide for these often confusing cases: First World War, Second World War, the Cold War, the Great War, World War I, World War II, either Eastern Europe or eastern Europe, but consistent use only. Conventions to be followed concerning dates are: 5th June 2006. Numbers of 100 or more should be written as numerals such as 1,000. Numbers less than 100 should be spelled out unless they contain a decimal or fraction. ‘Per cent’ should be used rather than ‘percent’ or’%’.

Please include your name and institutional affiliation (if any) at the end of the review.

Alternatively please identify a book that has been published this year and would be of interest to our readership. Contact the Book Reviews editors with its full publication details and we will inform you if your choice can be made available for review. As guidance, some recent book reviews published in our journal include the following titles:

Barnett, R. And Schwartz, R. (2008) (eds.), Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field on Cultural and Social Change. Brill.

Braziel, J.E. (2008) Diaspora: An Introduction. Wiley Blackwell.

Goldberg, D.T. (2009) The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Blackwell.

Cohen, R. (2009) Strangers in Their Homeland: A Critical Study of Israel’s Arab Citizens. Sussex Academic Press.

Koenig , M & de Guchteneire, P. (2007) Democracy and Human Rights in Multicultural Societies. Ashgate.

Laible, J. (2008) Separatism and Sovereignty in the New Europe: Party Politics and the Meanings of Statehood in a Supranational Context. Palgrave Macmillan.

MacClancy, J. (2007) Expressing Identities in the Basque Arena. James Curry.

Parekh, B. (2008) A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World. Palgrave.

Piterberg, G. (2008) The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel. Verso.

Price, R. (2007) Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination. University of Chicago Press.

Ryan, S. (2007) The Transformation of Violent Intercommunal Conflict. Ashgate.

Skya, W.A. (2009) Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism. Duke University Press.

Information for Publishers

Publishers wishing to have titles reviewed in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism should send review copies to:

SEN Book Reviews Editor

Clayton Fordahl