Feminist German Studies Style Guide

Preparing your manuscript (Adapted from the University of Nebraska Press’s Project Notes)

Feminist German Studies

Updated October 2021

General

  • Your article must not exceed 10,000 words including the endnotes and Works Cited. 
  • Use the MLA Handbook, 9th ed., as your style guide. 
  • Please include a short abstract (150 words) and a short bio (100 words) in a separate document.
  • You will submit two documents: one is the manuscript (with title and abstract), without your name or any other identifying information. The second document is the title of your submission, your name and institutional affiliation, abstract, and bio. 
  • Please prepare your manuscript for anonymous review. This means that no revealing information should be included in the manuscript itself, including in notes/citations. 
  • The final article should be organized as follows: title, author’s name, abstract, article, bio, notes, works cited.
  • Use Word’s automatic endnote function to insert notes (not manually) at the end of the section (not at the end of the document). Create a section break before the works cited. This allows you to place the notes between the body of the article and the works cited. Notes should be regular numerals.
  • Notes are for additional information, not citation information. Please use parenthetical citation throughout.
  • Use Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spaced throughout (including notes and works cited).
  • Insert page numbers in bottom right corner.
  • If you wish to include images, it is the responsibility of the author to secure the rights and forward this to the editors, who pass on to the press. Please submit image files separately in the best quality (300 dpi) and indicate in the text where the images should be placed. For more on how to handle images, please consult with the editors. 
  • Please translate all German into English. If there is a published translation, please use it.
    • For titles, if you are translating these yourself, please place the English version in parentheses at first mention following the date of the publication, with only the first word capitalized. For example: Wir Alpha-Mädchen (2008; We alpha-girls). 
    • For the title of a German work whose translation has been published in English, please include the information as follows: Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete (2008; Wetlands, 2009). 
    • Regardless of whether a published English translation exists, please use the original title of a German-language work throughout the article.
    • For quotations, if you are translating these yourself, please include the original German in the endnote. In the first translation, please make a note that the translations are your own (such as “All English translations mine unless otherwise indicated”). Page numbers go in the notes with the original German, not in the body of the article with the translated version. If you are using a published translation, there is no need to include the original German unless you need to make a point.
  • Feminist German Studies is committed to anti-racist feminism. This entails mitigating the violence and discriminatory potential of language and creating an inclusive scholarly space that challenges white supremacy. We encourage authors submitting to the journal to engage in feminist anti-racist citation practices; to acknowledge and highlight the work of junior scholars, Scholars of Color, and scholars in more vulnerable positions; and to disrupt and decenter traditional “Western/white,” heteronormative, and ableist academic knowledge production.

Text mechanics

  • Use the MLA Handbook, 9th ed., as your style guide.
  • Use the serial (Oxford) comma.
  • The press prefers the open punctuation style; please delete commas following short introductory phrases.
  • Use ‘s following a proper name ending in s to indicate possession (e.g., Simmons’s).
  • Set all foreign terms in italics, except for those that can be found and are not italicized in an English dictionary. If a foreign term needs to be italicized but is used many times in an article, you can italicize at the first mention and set the term in roman type thereafter. Do not put proper nouns in another language in italics (e.g., Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).
  • Spell out United States where it occurs as a noun but abbreviate as US where it occurs as an adjective (e.g., US population), without periods.
  • When using ellipses to indicate that you omitted part of the original text in a quotation, please put the ellipses in brackets, as so: […]. Note that FGS differs from the 9th edition of the MLA in this point.
  • Spell out numbers according to MLA 2.126-2.139.
  • That instead of which for restrictive clauses.
  • Put dates in the day-month-year order and (in the works cited only) abbreviate month names longer than 4 letters: 9 Nov. 1989
  • The abbreviation “et al.” is used only in parenthetical citations when a work has four or more authors. List all names in the works cited entry.
  • Note that FGS does accept the use of “they” as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun. 
  • In its commitment to anti-racism, FGS uses Black (capitalized), Brown (capitalized), and white (lowercase) when referring to race.

Notes and Works Cited

  • Double-check that each reference cited in the text is properly represented in the works cited.
  • Please move note markers to the ends of sentences, consolidating multiple notes within one sentence as necessary. 
  • Avoid using citations from secondary sources whenever possible (such as “Butler quoted in Hill”); go to the original.
  • Place parenthetical citations where it creates the least possible interruption (preferably at end of sentence).
  • When the title of a periodical (journal, magazine, newspaper) begins with an article (A, An, The), the article is now treated as part of the title: the article is italicized and its first letter capitalized. For example, the MLA handbook previously specified “the Georgia Review” in text and “Georgia Review” in the works-cited list but now specifies “The Georgia Review” in all contexts.
  • Please shorten the publisher’s name following the guidelines found in MLA 5.65: U of Nebraska P, UP of Mississippi.
  • Abbreviate inclusive numbers according to MLA 2.139.
  • Do not include access dates with URLs.
  • Note that the eighth edition of MLA introduces a new model for entries in the works-cited list. This is outlined on pages 105-106 and explored in detail from 5.1 to 5.99. The basic orientation is Author. Title. Title of container (self contained if book), Other contributors (translators or editors), Version (edition), Number (vol. and/or no.), Publisher, Publication Date, Location (pages, paragraphs URL or DOI). 2nd container’s title, Other contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication date, Location. For example:
    Bagchi, Alaknanda. “Conflicting Nationalisms: The Voice of the Subaltern in Mahasweta Devi’s Bashai Tudu.” Tulsa
    Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 15, no. 1, 1996, pp. 41-50.
    Brubaker, Bill. “New Health Center Targets County’s Uninsured Patients.” Washington Post, 24 May 2007, p. LZ01 [or URL]
    Gillespie, Paula, and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Citations go in order of the following:

  1. Author.
  2. Title of source.
  3. Title of container,
  4. Other contributors,
  5. Version,
  6. Number,
  7. Publisher,
  8. Publication date,
  9. Location.
  10. Title of potential second container,
  11. Other contributors,
  12. Version,
  13. Number,
  14. Publisher,
  15. Publication date,
  16. Location.

Deresiewicz, William. “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur.” The Atlantic, 28 Dec. 2014,
 www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-
entrepreneur/383497/.

In the above example, you have Author. Title of source. Title of container, Publication date, Location.

Goldman, Anne. “Questions of Transport: Reading Primo Levi Reading Dante.” The Georgia Review, vol. 64, no. 1, 2010, pp.
69–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41403188.

In this example we have Author. Title of source. Title of container, Volume, Number, Publication date, Location. Title of second container, Location.