St Anne’s Academic Review 9 – 2019
Letter from the Editor
Alexandra Jamieson
STAAR 9 – October 2019, p. i
Appearing in the ninth volume of the St Anne’s Academic Review (STAAR) are ten pieces from current or recent members of St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. This edition of STAAR includes articles from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences as well as a new section, SPARK reviews. This is in order to have a dedicated section for film, TV and book reviews.
STAAR went through a number of transformations last year and we have ensured they were continued this year. Most notably, peer review was successfully conducted on all research articles and opinion pieces. In the online version the reviewer comments will be made available for download, in the spirit of open peer review. We are very pleased with how implementing this evaluation process has gone. I am very grateful to my team of editors who were enthusiastically behind inviting reviewers and handling the review process. It has been a great success with each of the five accepted articles having at least two reviews leading to a total of 13 reviewers involved with STAAR this year.
This year is the ten-year anniversary of STAAR and to honour this we have ten articles in this year’s edition as well as a letter from the first editor-in-chief, Daria Luchinskaya. We are very grateful to Daria for writing this letter, reflecting on ten years of STAAR. While in the past STAAR has had a theme for the articles, the 2019 publication, with its five academic articles, has been made to allow members of the college to submit articles on any subject they wished. This has led to a very diverse set of articles, from dispelling misconceptions of nuclear energy to exploring artistic representation in the Roman period.
New to STAAR this year was SPARK reviews headed up by Daniel Mercieca. Dan was instrumental in creating SPARK reviews, including coming up with the name and developing it into its own section of STAAR. I am very grateful for all the hard work Dan has put into making SPARK reviews what it is today. Thanks to Dan’s efforts there are five very insightful reviews ranging from a review of the book Why We Sleep to a review of the popular British television series Years and Years. I look forward to seeing SPARK reviews develop further over the next few years.
Last year STAAR ran a crowdfunding campaign to ensure it continued to have funds to support the running of the journal in the future. The campaign was a success, raising enough funds to keep STAAR self-sufficient for a few years. Again, I would like to thank everyone who donated funds to help STAAR back in 2018.
It was a pleasure to have worked alongside such a great team of editors. It has been a joy and I offer my sincerest gratitude to all. They maintained academic integrity throughout and were committed to ensuring the ninth volume of STAAR was a success. Additionally, I am thankful to Valeria Taddei for always being there to discuss ideas and for her commitment to the role of Production and Web Design Manager.
It has been a pleasure to serve as the editor-in-chief.
I hope you enjoy reading our ninth issue of STAAR.
Sincerely,
Alex Jamieson
Letter from the Editor by Alexandra Jamieson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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St Anne's Academic Review (STAAR) A Publication by St Anne's College Middle Common Room ISSN 2048-2566 (Online) ISSN 2515-6527 (Print)