In celebration of Kate Tyler Wall’s twentieth anniversary serving as the managing editor for the Journal of the Early Republic, we’ve asked her some questions about her time with the JER, changes in academic publishing, and what she predicts for the future of academic journals.

Can you tell us how you got into this line of work? Did you always want to do editorial work (and specifically editorial work related to American history)?

The University of Delaware didn’t have a journalism major, so I majored in poli sci with a journalism concentration and a U.S history minor. I was interested in labor and immigration history and American studies. By the time I was a senior I had enough credits for the minor if I took the two mandatory intro survey courses. My father taught U.S. history at the high school and college level and had an ABD PhD in it. One wall of my house is nothing but his history book collection. I spent a few years in the production end of publishing, then 21 years at what is now the International Literacy Association. For the last 11 years there, I was Editorial Director of the Journals Department, supervising 4-6 international journals. I am very good at getting off sinking ships, so right around the time when the place was seriously starting to worry me I saw Roderick McDonald’s ad for a managing editor for JER. Everyone told me I was crazy to leave and give up all that seniority and almost two-thirds of my income for a job that was guaranteed for only three years. Within two years almost all of my former co-workers had been laid off, and very few were able to continue working in the publishing field. And the three years became 20.

What’s your favorite part of serving as the JER’s managing editor?

The chance to get such an in-depth education in the period of U.S. history I probably knew the least about initially. I knew far more about the latter half of the 19^th century than I did the early republic years because the high school and college courses tended to jump straight from the American Revolution to the Civil War, with only a very quick doodle around the Mexican War, killing Native Americans, and Bleeding Kansas. Now the early republic era is what I’d study if I could go back. It covers a huge amount of ground. I am always finding out more about things we all should have been taught about in school but were not. A single manuscript submission might send me down a deep rabbit hole of research. And another benefit is that suddenly all that 19^th-century literature I read in high school and college makes so much more sense—the constant, almost frantic overlay of economics and class but almost nothing about politics, for instance. You have to know the history to really get why that is.

You’ve had a hand in the last twenty years in producing some of the most groundbreaking scholarship in the history of the early American republic. What new stories or historiographical shifts have you found most interesting?

As more collections and other resources have been digitized, scholars have access to new materials to investigate and interpret. And this often leads to fresh interpretations of the more familiar work. Topics ebb and flow. I am always interested in submissions about women, immigrants, and labor. A few years ago the editors were frantic because so many submissions were coming in that dealt with slavery issues in some form, and we were running out of qualified peer reviewers! For most of the time I’ve been here, we’ve tended to have fewer submissions about the earlier parts of the timeframe JER covers, but with the 250^th coming up we are seeing an uptick. And there has always been a lot of material covering the concepts of what constitutes citizenship and political rights and how that relates to immigrants. Obviously, that has gained a painful new relevance.

Academic publishing is an industry that has seen sweeping changes in the last couple of decades. What do you see as the most significant changes in the field that impact a journal like the JER?

JER is one of a vanishingly few journals that still have a human like me handling submissions and peer review. Most academic journals are part of larger consortiums with the work done in databases and overseas, with no personal touch. AI is beginning to play a scary role. I just read about a book that was copy-edited by AI, and it took a human six weeks to correct the mess of misinformation and outright errors it had introduced. JER had its first brush with AI hallucinations recently. An author had used an AI aid to calculate some fractional and proportional statistics out of some widely available census data—something for which you would think AI might actually be useful. One of our sharp-eyed editorial assistants spotted that the math wasn’t mathing, so the author recalculated them by hand. The AI stuff was just . . . off.

What challenges do you anticipate for academic publishing moving forward?

I am seriously afraid that scholarly publishing will lose all credibility if AI continues along the present path and fewer humans are involved in the publishing process. I hate to see passion for the subject smoothed away by processes that minimize and denigrate that human effort. And SHEAR is lucky to be an independent entity, because scholarly journals and presses affiliated with universities are under a great deal of political pressure right now to censor material and lie about history.

Do you have any advice for folks who might be interested in a career in this kind of editorial work?

Scholarly publishing is a great field for anyone who studied journalism but doesn’t see a career path there, for humanities majors who don’t want to teach, and for creatives who want to do something useful as a day job but not feel compromised.

Apart from the incredible expertise you have in the fields of early America and academic publishing, you have a host of other talents and interests—music, for one! Tell us a bit more about what occupies your time when you aren’t at work.

I published a novel, Arboria Park, back in 2017. I have written three others, all having to do with music and some piece of local history, but am not seeing a path to publication at the moment. When I started working for SHEAR in Philly, I began spending a lot of time there seeing punk rock and Americana bands—I used to see 150 to 180 bands a year. During Covid I bought a guitar and began writing songs. The pandemic and its aftermath meant that a lot of venues closed and musicians’ touring patterns changed, so I don’t see as many shows now. And for the past year, we have had to spend a lot of time just staying informed of what’s going on and trying to do something about it. My husband calculated that one or both of us attended 54 protest rallies or demonstrations in the past 12 months, either in Philly or our hometown. We are also writing a lot of emails to politicians and undergoing various types of training. I walk around Independence Hall on the same paths as the founders, wondering some of the same things: Is something I do or write or say going to get me imprisoned? Knowing the many difficult times of the nation’s past has helped me get through this particular period of history. I just wish everyone really knew and understood all of the history I’ve learned in the past 20 years, and instead I am watching it dismantled in front of my eyes. The survival of things like JER and SHEAR is a small but mighty force to stand against what’s happening.