Slavic Review

• 1. Introduction

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  Slavic Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal with a scope far wider than its name suggests. It describes its territory as "Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, past and present". That phrase takes in many regions, languages and peoples, and the word Slavic covers only part of it. The journal publishes scholarly studies, reviews of books and films, and review essays. Scholars from every discipline that touches the region contribute. The title points back to the field's roots in Slavic studies, yet the pages examine far more than the Slavic world. So how did a journal with such a narrow-sounding name come to carry such a broad mission? Who has steered it? And how does a reader today actually find its articles?

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• 2. A Journal of Many Names

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  The title Slavic Review has been in use since 1961, and it was not the first name the journal carried. Before that, the same association had been publishing a series since 1941, under a succession of titles. The earliest was Slavonic Year-Book. American Series. In 1943 it became Slavonic and East European Review. American Series, a title used for only two years, 1943-1944. From 1945 until 1961 the series appeared as American Slavic and East European Review. Each change shifted the emphasis a little, and the final switch dropped the longer phrasing for something shorter. Since 1961 the journal has appeared quarterly. Its publisher is the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, an organization that took a new name of its own in 2010. It is now the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, known as ASEEES. The subtitle has changed even while the main title stayed put. Those revisions track shifting terminology about the region, changing borders and relationships, and new ideas about what the field should cover. Since 2006 the subtitle has read Interdisciplinary Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. That wording makes the journal's breadth explicit in a way the main title never did.

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• 3. The Editors' Chair

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  Diane P. Koenker held the editor-in-chief post from 1996 to 2006, a full decade. She was based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her successor, Mark D. Steinberg, came from the same university and took over in 2006. He served until 2013. Harriet Murav followed him in August 2013 and stayed until August 2023, another decade at the helm. The current editor is Eugene M. Avrutin, who also teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Three of the four editors named in the source share that one campus. The editorship has therefore been anchored in Illinois across nearly three decades. A change of publisher came partway through that run, as the next chapter explains.

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• 4. Finding the Archive

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  In 2017 Cambridge University Press became the journal's publisher. That move placed a long-running scholarly title with one of the best-known academic presses. Readers who want older material have an easy route. Every back issue is available electronically through JSTOR. Current and recent issues are handled differently. Their electronic versions are offered to association members through the ASEEES website. Researchers can also find individual articles through the indexes that follow the journal. It is abstracted and indexed in the American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies, the Social Sciences Citation Index, Historical Abstracts, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and the Linguistic Bibliography. That list mixes area-studies, history, social-science, humanities and linguistics resources. It mirrors the interdisciplinary reach claimed in the journal's own subtitle.

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