Symposium is meant to be a broad, interdisciplinary academic journal; for each edition, we hope to collect a complementary and diverse selection of works. To this end, we are happy to accept essays with varying perspectives, subjects, styles, lengths, etc. Below, however, are certain guidelines to help you determine if your essay is appropriate for submission. Please take these guidelines as only very loose regulations; we are willing and expect to make exceptions.


1. Submissions will be considered on the basis of four criteria:

a) How ambitious is the thesis?
b) How convincing is the argument?
c) How well is the essay written?
d) How relevant is the essay to a contemporary reader? (How interesting
are the points being raised?)

Point (d) cannot be over-stated. Obviously, we imagine that most essays will address older texts and events, but we’d prefer that the thesis ask questions or raise concerns that are still of interest today. (This guideline is a tighter regulation than most.)

2. Symposium is a humanities-based magazine. This would imply that most essays produced in Group I, II, or III classes are suitable for submission. Consider, however, whether your essay would be relevant or intelligible to a reader who has never studied your subject.

3. We expect that most essays will either: a) evaluate some historic or artistic event; b) trace some running academic concern; or c) analyze particular texts. (E.g. revisionist perspectives of the French Revolution, feminism in German literature, parallels between the Odyssey and the Aeneid.) These (rather broad) categories being established as the core of the magazine, essays that don't conform to any of the groups are of course still welcome.

4. Should an essay focus on some particular text, we will probably favor theses addressing more than just a single work. Due to the dialectic interest of the magazine, we prefer essays of broader relevance than an argument centered around a single book. (E.g. a comparison between Burke and Rousseau vs. an examination of floral imagery in Their Eyes Were Watching God.)

4b. If the essay does concern a single text, please consider that the argument must be relevant and interesting to someone who has never read the book. (E.g. the Christian re-evaluation of pagan icons in Dante’s Inferno would probably be interesting; ring structure in Canto XIV probably wouldn’t.)

5. Generally, our word limit is 4000 words. Generally. If we like the essay, we’re certainly not going to stop reading after the 13th page.