Guidelines

Submission

Romance Sphere publishes reviews, essays, videos, and other materials pertaining to the culture, history, and society of countries, regions, or communities where French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, or Catalan is spoken. Prior to submission each item must be read and approved by at least one faculty member of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Even after that approval, the editors may request additional revisions or cuts. Editors will indicate the deadline by which they require consequent revisions to be made. 


Romance Sphere presently accepts submissions only from members of the Harvard community, including visiting lecturers, visiting scholars, and alumni, as well as faculty and students from institutions with whom the department has reciprocal agreements. Additionally, contributors at conferences and events hosted by RLL may submit their contributions for inclusion on the "Conference Proceedings" page. 

Final draft

Email all manuscripts and other materials to any member in the editorial board. In the subject line specify the genre (one of the following: Review, Essay, Video, Words & images) followed by the linguistic area to which it primarily refers (one of the following: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romance studies). Large files may be copied on a flahs drive and mailed to: Romance Sphere, Department of Romance Languages, Harvard University, Boylston Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138.

It is important that you submit also:
1) A list of keywords or tags that will facilitate the search of your article;

2) A text of less than 280 characters that will be pasted in a Tweet;

3) A description in approximately 600 characters that will be posted on Facebook;

4) A short bio about yourself (20 to 60 words);

5) A picture of yourself. For more information see Metadata.

The editors reserve the right to make editorial revisions.

Already published materials

Romance Sphere will consider for publication articles previously published in print. Articles that have appeared online in a different language will be also considered.

Language

Documents may be written or produced in English, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. Please use a spelling and grammar checker in that language before submitting your article. In addition, if you are not a native speaker of the language in which you are writing, you should have a native speaker proofread your article before you submit it for consideration. You will not receive proofs before publication, and correcting mistakes of materials already online is a time-consuming process.

In reviews, article reviews, and items posted on op-ed, all quotations included must be in translation.
In an essay, you may quote a passage either in its original language or in translation. When the original language is not crucial (for example in quoting a scholarly book) it is better to quote only in translation. If you quote the original text, you should provide its translation as well. These translations should be in brackets and immediately follow the quotation in the body of the article. Whenever the text in question has been published in translation, use that translation; when quoting a work that has not been translated, provide your own translation.

Length

Reviews: approximately 800 words.
Article reviews: 1200 to 3500 words.
Essays: 1500 to 6000 words (in any case not more than 10,000 words), including endnotes. Essays up to 2000 words long will be published in HTML; longer essays will be published as PDF files. 
Please remember that if you are submitting an essay longer than 2000 words, you must include an abstract of up to 250 words.
Video: no more than 15 minutes.

File format

Submit the final version of your article as a Word document file (.doc or .docx). Please check to be sure that your file does not have visible editorial markups; that is, if you have edited your file with "track changes" or if you have made comments, be sure to remove those markings before submitting your file. Do not "lock" your file.
Lines should be single-spaced, including quotations and (where permitted) endnotes. No spacing before or after each line. Left justify all pages.
Reviews: One single paragraph (that is, no period-and-new-paragraph), no indentation, no block quotations, no bullets, no numbered lists. Font: Verdana, size 10pt.
Article reviews: First line indentation: 0.25". Font: Book Antiqua, size 10pt. Block quotations: no indentation, size 8pt.
Essays: First line indentation: 0.25". Font: Century Schoolbook, size 12pt. Block quotations: no indentation, size 11pt. Endnotes: no indentation, size 10pt. 
Short articles published in the Words & Images section: No indentation, no block quotations. Font: Tahoma, size 10pt (reviews published in Words & Images); American Typewriter, size 10 (other articles published in Words & Images).

Metadata 

Along with your article please provide the following information:
1) A list of between 10-20 keywords or tags. Some of these keywords should be in English, other ones in the appropriate Romance language or languages.
2) A text of fewer than 259 characters that will be pasted in a Tweet (21 characters will be used by the link). You can write the Tweet in English or in any Romance language. Use the hashtag symbol # before relevant keywords, so that they are found more easily in Twitter Search. Remember that hashtags must be counted as characters and that it is recommended not to use more than 3 hashtags per Tweet. See Romance Sphere's page on Twitter for examples. 
3) A description of your article, preferably written it in the same language in which you wrote the article. This description will be posted on Facebook and will be used to facilitate Internet searches. You can also provide a translation of the description in another language (or more than one). The total length of this text cannot exceed 600 characters.
4) A short bio about yourself (20-60 words).
5) A JPG file with a picture of yourself, to be published in small size at the side of your biographical information.
6) If you are submitting an essay longer than 2000 words, you must include an abstract of up to 250 words. 
7) All reviews must be accompanied by a JPG file with the image of the cover of the book (or of the playbill of the film or of the event). Do not paste or insert the image in your Word file: it must be sent as a separate file. 
If you are submitting a video, send also a Word document containing the above information.

Multimedia

In addition to text, Romance Sphere can publish image and video files.
Images should be in JPG or GIF format. Supply each illustration with a caption, accompanied by a source line and the acknowledgments that are required. If necessary, indicate the appropriate position in the text for all images and tables.
Video file formats supported are MOV and MPEG. Each video should be no longer than 15 minutes and include titles and credits.

Fair use

Please remember that under the "fair use" rule of copyright law, you may make limited use of another author's work without asking permission. Properly giving credit to the author is not sufficient. Although there is no absolute word limit, you should never quote more than a few successive paragraphs from a book or article that is not in the public domain.
You must have appropriate permissions to use images, sound, or video created by someone other than yourself, if they do not fall within fair-use guidelines. For more information, see the Copyright and Fair Use guide by the Harvard University Office of the General Counsel: https://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use.

 

Stylistic requirements

Conventions:

Spelling, punctuation, use of decimals, and other conventions should follow American standards for articles in English; and French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish standards for articles in those languages.

Quotations:

Quoted words, phrases, and sentences must be enclosed in double quotation marks ("like these"). Single quotation marks must enclose quotations within quotations. In reviews and article-length reviews (that is, all texts that will be published in HTML), do not use angle quotes (« »). In essays and other documents published as PDFs you may use angle quotes when writing in Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

When writing in English, place all periods and commas within quotation marks; other punctuation should be included within quotation marks only if it is part of the quotation cited.

In French, Italian, and Spanish, periods, commas, colons, and semicolons are always placed after the quotation mark; question marks and exclamation points should be included within the quotation marks only if they are part of the quotation cited.

Dashes:

In English, use long dashes ("em" dashes) without any space before or after, as in the following examples: "Will he—can he—leave now?"

In French and Italian, leave a space before and after a shorter dash ("en" dash): "Malgrado ciò – o proprio per ciò – aveva ottenuto quello che voleva".

In Spanish, leave a space before the long dash and another space in closing the parenthetic clause: "la bibliografía existente —incluso en español— es bastante extensa".

Dashes can be expressed also with two hyphens (--). Please do not use a single hyphen in place of a dash.

Italics:

For emphasis or titles use only italics (do not use bold face or underline).

Double space:

Do not double-space after periods.

Inclusive numbers:

In the body of the text and in notes, inclusive page numbers and dates should be typed according to the following examples: 3–17, 23–26, 100–103, 104–7, 124–28, 1002–1006, 1115–20, 1496–1504.

Titles:

Although the editors often change the title of an article, you should submit your own proposal. Please include it at the top of the first page of your article. Please conform to the following examples:

Reviews:

SARAH LUEHRMAN AXELROD   [reviewer’s name]  

Convergenze. Gli strumenti letterari e le altre discipline  [book title]  

by Remo Ceserani  [author of the book]

Bruno Mondadori, 208 pp., € 18.00  [publisher, total number of pages, cost]

Article reviews:

Before Babel   [article title]

Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language   [book title]

by Daniel Heller-Roazen  [author of the book]

Zone Books, 287 pp., $21.95  [publisher, total number of pages, cost]

Virginie Greene   [reviewer’s name]

Essays:

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza    [author]

KALEIDOSCOPIC DEMOCRATIC VISTAS  [title]  

Translating John Ashbery through Spanish and Latin American Poetry  [subtitle]

Notes

Do not include notes in reviews, article reviews, or short essays (up to 2000 words).
Notes may be included in long essays (more than 2000 words), which will be published as PDFs. Notes should be numbered consecutively, single spaced, and placed as endnotes.

References (in a review) 

At the end of your review or article review you may add a list of books that you mentioned or cited. List only books that are in print and include the following information: Author’s name and last name, Title (in italics), Editor (if any), Publisher, number of pages, cost in $, €, or other currency. Do not include the place and date of publication. Do not specify if it is a translation, and do not include the name of the translator. Calculate the total number of pages (228 pp., not XXVI-202).
A couple of examples:
Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, 127 pp., Westview, $25.00.
André Malraux, Essais,éd. Jean-Yves Tadié et al., Gallimard (Pléiade), 1488 pp., € 65.00.
In a review, do not give the page numbers of your quotations in the body of the text (you may, however, do so in an article review).

References (in an essay)

In an essay you can include notes or a final bibliography of works cited or both. If you include both, full citations should be given only in the final bibliography.

Citations

Refer to the following basic citation examples for the first full reference; subsequent references should be shortened to author (last name only) and page number, or author, short title, and page number, as necessary for clarity. Do not use op. cit. or ibid. Avoid subsequent notes citing the same work: rather, consolidate them. When you are mostly quoting from a single work, after the first citation page numbers may be given in the text, enclosed in parenthesis. For other issues, see The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. For articles in Italian, also Roberto Lesina, Il nuovo manuale di stile (Zanichelli, 1994).

Book: 

Pedro Enríquez Ureña, La utopía de América (Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989), 200-11. [Do not include the place of publication.] 
Roberto Esposito, Bíos. Biopolitica e filosofia (Einaudi, 2004), 51-54 . [In citations of Frenchand Italian books, separate the title and the subtitle with a period, not with a colon.] 
In an article in English: Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà, eds., Atlante della letteratura italiana, vol. I, Dalle origini al Rinascimento, ed. Amedeo de Vincentiis (Einaudi, 2010), 156-67.
In an article in Italian: Sergio Luzzatto e Gabriele Pedullà (a cura di),Atlante della letteratura italiana, vol. I, Dalle origini al Rinascimento, a cura di Amedeo de Vincentiis (Einaudi, 2010), 156-67. OR: Sergio Luzzatto e Gabriele Pedullà (a cura di),Atlante della letteratura italiana, vol. I, Dalle origini al Rinascimento, a cura di Amedeo de Vincentiis, Einaudi, 2010, pp. 156-67. 
In an article in Spanish: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico (Punto de Lectura, 2007). 

Translated book: 

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (2000), trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Continuum, 2004), 21-27. [Include the date of the first printing in the original language.] 
In an article in Italian: Reinhart Koselleck, Il vocabolario della modernità. Progresso, crisi, utopia e altre storie di concetti (2006), trad. Carlo Sandrelli (Il Mulino, 2009).
In an article in Spanish: Umberto Eco, El péndulo de Foucault, trad. Ricardo Pochtar y Helena Lozano (Bompiani-Lumen-Patria, 1989).

Article from a collection of essays: 

Antonio Gramsci, "Culture and Class Struggle" (1918), in Selections from Cultural Writings, eds. David Forgacs and Goffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Harvard University Press, 1985), 31-34.
Francesc M. Quílez i Corella, "The Art of the Poster," in Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí, eds. William H. Robinson et. al. (Cleveland Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2006), 69-71.

Book (part of a multi-volume work): 

Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit (Seuil, 1983-85), 2: 101.

Journal article: 

Guillermo García-Corales, "El acto ético y la precariedad en la narrativa de Ramón Díaz Eterovic," Revista iberoamericana, 231 (2010), 307-24.
Jeannene M. Przyblyski , "Revolution at a Standstill: Photography and the Paris Commune of 1871," Yale French Studies, 101 (2001): 54-78.

Classical References: 

The edition, as well as credit for translation, must be specified the first time a work is cited. You should use standard scholarly editions and translations when they exist for the work in question unless your argument requires otherwise. References to information supplied by a modern editor must include page numbers. References to a classical text must include the standard identification numbers for that text, such as book and chapter numbers or Stephanus pagination. Standard abbreviations may be used. Use Arabic numbers for all divisions.
Plato, Republic, 360e–361b.
Cicero, De officiis, 1.133.

Edition: 

The published works of many authors have standard critical or scholarly editions, and some have similarly standard English translations. For any author or text treated or discussed in a substantial manner in your article, please use such editions whenever possible. If you use your own translation please indicate this with “my translation,” “translation mine,” or another indication.

Blogs

The editors of Romance Sphere reserve the right to delete any posted open blog item that they consider offensive, inappropriate, or irrelevant. Please note that for now only participants who log in with a Harvard ID and PIN will be able to post an item on a blog.