CfP & Guidelines

Call for Papers

dePICTions volume 5

The (Ottoman) Empire Strikes Back

Curating Editor: David Selim Sayers

With the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate on 1 November 1922, the last of the great agrarian empires came to an end. But while states may cease to exist overnight, the same cannot be said of the cultures on which they are built. The continued relevance of the Ottoman Empire today is mainly due to the multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious culture it fostered for six centuries, a culture that refuses to die to this day.

Incontrovertible proof of life can be found in all fields from cuisine, as shown in Tassos Boulmetis’ masterful 2003 film, Politiki Kouzina, to Greek/Turkish folk music, and all the way to a string of atrocities including the Yazidi, Bosnian, and Armenian Genocides that have all tried—and failed—to homogenize the irreducible cultural patchwork of the former Ottoman territories. Furthermore, with its refreshing take on a range of issues from gender to justice, the Ottoman world offers impulses to rethink pretty much all that we take for granted—or for inevitable—in our own cultures today.

We welcome approaches that treat the Ottoman world not as a historical cold case, but as a living entity with continued—even urgent—pertinence today, whether in terms of ideas or of facts. While we are primarily interested in perspectives from the humanities, arts, and social sciences, we are also open to texts from other traditions (provided that our reviewer pool enables a fair assessment).

We welcome articles (3500-7000 words) by authors who understand themselves as public intellectuals. As such, articles should (a) reflect the current state of research, (b) have a distinct, critical point of view, and (c) present the issues in a way that is accessible not just to scholars, but to a broader public audience interested in critical thinking.

We further welcome book reviews (max. 2000 words), interviews (open word count), and literary/artistic pieces (open word count) that relate to the volume’s theme. Reviews of older books are welcome as long as they (a) are original and previously unpublished, (b) take the book’s historical context under consideration, and (c) contribute a critical and contemporary view to the debate.

Please consult and follow the dePICTions Submission Guidelines prior to submission.

dePICTions welcomes unsolicited articles as well as those written by special invitation.

Submission deadline: 15 January 2025

Publication date: Spring/Summer 2025

Queries and submissions: depictions@parisinstitute.org

All submissions should include (in this order):

  1. Title
  2. Full name(s) of the author(s)
  3. Abstract (max. 100 words)
  4. Biographical note (max. 50 words)
  5. E-mail address (this will be published; if you would like to use a different address for correspondence with the editors, please indicate this.)
  6. Text (formatted according to the stylesheet)
  • Text should be single-spaced and unjustified.
  • Fonts should be standard (Times New Roman, Calibri, etc.), font size 12pt.
  • Files should be submitted in *.doc or *.docx formats.
  • Please do not use automatically formatted headings, spaces before or after text, or indents (apart from block quotes).
  • Paragraphs should be separated by a single blank line.
  • Main and section titles should be bold.
  • In the main and section titles, please capitalize nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Please do not capitalize prepositions (if shorter than 6 letters), articles, and conjunctions.
  • Italics should only be used for non-English words and the titles of stand-alone works (books, films, etc.).
  • Please distinguish between hyphen ( – to separate parts of a word and between numbers) and em dash ( — to separate parts of a sentence, with no space on either side).
  • Acronyms should be written in all caps, whether spoken as letters (e.g., USA) or words (e.g., COVID).
  • Please do not use the possessive “s” after a word ending in “s” (e.g., do not use Dennis’s; use Dennis’ instead).
  • Please capitalize conceptual usages of regular vocabulary (e.g., “West” and “Western” to refer to a cultural concept rather than a compass direction).
  • Please use the serial comma (e.g., “Jane, John, and Jake went to the supermarket.”).
  • Direct quotes should be placed in double quotation marks. Use single quotation marks for quotes within quotes.
  • Unless they are part of the original quotation, please place colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation marks outside quotation marks. In contrast, commas and periods should be inside quotation marks whether part of the original or added by the quoting author.
  • Quotes that are longer than 3 lines should be formatted as block quotes and indented 1 cm from the left.
  • Any additions to or omissions from a quote should be marked by square brackets, e.g., “[…]”.
  • Double quotation marks may be used as scare quotes to emphasize a word, but this should be done sparingly.
  • All bibliographical information should be included in endnotes that follow direct or indirect quotations.
  • Endnotes should come after all punctuation except the dash; they should also come after, not inside, quotation marks.
  • Please use automatically generated endnotes with Arabic numerals.
  • When formatting bibliographical references, please do not use an automated reference system but follow the guidelines below.
  • For repeated references to the same text, use a short form (last name of author, abbreviated title [max. first three words], page number; e.g., “Streeck, Buying Time, 35.”).
  • Please do not include two-letter US state abbreviations (e.g., Stanford, CA or Cambridge, MA) in references.
  • Please do not use “ibid.”, “f.”, or “ff.”.
  • Explanatory endnotes should be used sparingly.

Monographs

  • First Name Surname, Title: Subtitle, translated by First Name Surname, edition, Place of publication: Publisher, year of publication, page.
    • Example: Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, translated by Patrick Camiller, New York: Verso, 2014, 7-8.

Chapters in edited volumes

  • First Name Surname, “Chapter Title: Subtitle,” in First Name Surname/First Name Surname (eds.), Title: Subtitle, Place of publication: Publisher, year of publication, page range of chapter, here precise page from which quotation is taken.
    • Example: Carlo Salzani, “Walter Benjamin,” in Adam Kotsko and Carlo Salzani (eds.), Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 27-38, here 35.

Journal articles

  • First Name Surname, “Article Title: Subtitle,” Journal Title, volume.issue (year), page range of article, here precise page from which quotation is taken.
  • If a doi (digital object identifier) is needed, please add after a comma at the end.
    • Example: Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” Poetics Today, 6.1/2 (1985), 133–152, here 134.

Websites

  • First Name Surname or Name of Webpage, “Title: Subtitle,” Name of Webpage, date of publication or last update, at URL [access date].
  • Adapt this sample based on the information available, but always include the name of the webpage, URL, and access date.
    • Example: Ross Douthat, “Is the Religious Right Privileged?,” The New York Times, 18 June 2019, at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/religion-race-liberalism.html [26 June 2019].

Engineering, medicine, applied sciences

  • Alternative citation guidelines for articles in engineering, medicine, the applied sciences, and similar fields are accepted (e.g., listing of multiple author names).
  • Interviews should be preceded by a brief introductory text; no abstract is necessary.
  • The first question and answer should be preceded by the full names of interviewer and interviewee; thereafter, initials are used (e.g., “Jane Smith” for the first question/answer; “JS” for the second and onwards).
  • All interview questions should be in bold.
  • Please mark the space between an answer and the next question with a blank.