Since 2014, the American Quarterly journal has been based outside of the (continental) United States and has been edited by a transnational team of scholars based in Hawai'i and parts of Asia and the Pacific, including Canada, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.  The current editorial team is committed to soliciting. reviewing. and editing the best cutting-edge scholarship in all areas of American Studies while particularly invested in re-framing and resituating American Studies by advancing the studies of Indigenous histories, communities, and identities and transnational, comparative approaches to American experiences. But what does this really mean in terms of the actual editorial practice?

This presentation reviews, from the perspective of an Associate Editor of American Quarterly journal, the significance of this relocation to Hawai'i and the transnational editorial team to the kind of the journal that the AQ has become. What kinds of scholarship are particularly compelling to the present board of editors, and what is less so? How does this shape the editorial decisions that guide the selection of articles? What does the editorial process itself look like from submission to publication?

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez is Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of the Honors Program at University ofHawai'i at Manoa. She is the author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism m Hawai'i and the Philippines, and co-editor, with Hokulani Aikau, of Detours: A Decolonial Guide (Duke forthcoming ). She is also serving as an Associate Editor of the American Quarterly journal, and is currently finishing a monograph on Isabel Rosario Cooper, a mixed race vaudeville and film star infamous for being Douglas MacArthur's mistress.