Jennifer L. Airey, University of Tulsa
Vol. 43, No. 2 (Fall 2024)
From the Editor
TSWL: AI Policy
Recently, a curious thing happened here in the offices of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature: We received a full-length article submission about a novel that does not exist. While the ostensible author of the novel is a well-established contemporary writer, the specific novel analyzed was fake, as were the reviews and critical sources cited in the essay. In short, TSWL received what I can only assume is our first fully AI-generated submission. Our entire office was flabbergasted, and I confess, a part of me wonders if we were being targeted as part of an experiment. The marks of AI generation were so obvious —and the submission’s author so untraceable online—that it seems plausible that a social scientist may be testing scholarly journals to see how many would fall for an AI scam. But regardless, the incident made clear that TSWL needs an explicit AI policy, something I previously thought unnecessary. After all, we are a journal of literary criticism; surely, I assumed, our authors would understand the expectation that their writing will be their own. But clearly times are changing, and thus we have adopted the following formal policy:
As a journal of literary criticism dedicated to the analysis of the written word, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature will not consider submissions produced through generative artificial intelligence. This prohibition includes but is not limited to the use of artificial intelligence to write text, survey preexisting criticism, or generate ideas. AI generated images or translated passages may be included with clear attribution when appropriate, and the author assumes all responsibility for the accuracy of these inclusions. Online tools that correct grammar or spelling are also acceptable, provided that the tool does not substantially rewrite an author’s prose; any changes made to wording by an AI tool must be clearly cited in the article.
I am frankly skeptical of grammar checkers which can obscure an author’s own voice and easily cross the line from editing prose to creating it. But I also recognize that these tools can serve as equalizers, especially for non-native speakers of English. To that end, we will allow their use sparingly, provided their contributions are explicitly cited.
As I hope this policy makes clear, we want to read and learn from your ideas, not from a computer composite of preexisting works. We are also sensitive to the ethical problems inherent in AI use, including the environmental damage it creates and the human biases it replicates. At base, TSWL values the critical productions of human creativity, from both our subjects of analysis and our authors.
With the publication of this issue, I would like to thank our editorial interns, Lizy Bailey, Oliver Dong, and Yuhyeoi Kim, for their hard work and care for the journal. I’m very lucky to have such a great team! And my especial thanks to Carol Kealiher, our Managing Editor, who keeps this place running on a daily basis. I’m so grateful for your dedication to the journal, your empathy and sense of humor, and your keen sense of editorial style!
With this issue, we say good-bye to board members Elizabeth Sheehan and Margaret Stetz, with our deep thanks for their service. In their place, we welcome the following new members:
Simone A. James Alexander is Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University. Her primary fields of research include women, gender, and sexuality studies, postcolonial literature, transnational feminist theory, Caribbean studies, and migration and diaspora studies. She is the author of the award-winning monograph African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship (2014), which also received Honorable Mention by the African Literature Association Book of the Year Scholarship Award. Alexander is additionally the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (2001) and coeditor of Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (2013). Her work has been published in Journal of West Indian Literature, L’Espirit Créateur, African American Review, MLA Approaches to Teaching Gaines: “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and Other Work, Turkish Journal of Diaspora Studies, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, African Literature Today, Anglistica: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and edited collections. Her current book projects include Bodies of (In)Difference: Intimacy, Desirability, and the Politics and “Poetics of Relation,” Black Freedom in (Communist) Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions, and the edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to Colson Whitehead (Cambridge University Press). Alexander has held fellowships from Wuhan University, China, the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and a Study Abroad Scholarship to Moscow, Russia. She serves on Sage Editorial Board, Kosmos Publishers Editorial Board, and is the book-review editor of sx: small axe salon. Alexander has received the Researcher of the Year Award for her scholarly work and for outstanding leadership. She is on the executive board of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars organization where she also serves as the Vice President.
J. Ashley Foster is Associate Professor of Twentieth- and Twenty-First- Century British Literature with an emphasis in Digital Humanities in the Department of English at California State University, Fresno. Working at the intersection of literary studies, digital humanities, peace studies, and women’s studies, Foster’s scholarship and teaching employ digital tools to trace the relationships between artistic and activist networks of the long twentieth century and to facilitate intertextual readings between literature and archives. Her publications include “Bloomsbury and War” in the Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018), the co-authored “Challenging a ‘Warist’ Society with Digital Peace Pedagogy” in Radical Teacher (2020), and “Paradoxes and Ambivalent Pacifisms: Mulk Raj Anand and His Two Gandhis” in Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Lessons from Our Modern Times and Moral Challenges (2022). Her essay, “Friendship as First Philosophy: Peace Making and Quaker Traces in Jacob’s Room and Roger Fry,” is forthcoming in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism, and Religion, and her book project, Impossible Witness: Modernist Peace Testimonies from the Spanish Civil War, is currently under contract with the Clemson University Press; it illuminates a concern for peace and social justice in the study of modernism. Along with her graduate students, she curated the Digital Humanities and Special Collections exhibitions Testimonies in Art & Action: Igniting Pacifism in the Face of Total War, which ran from 6 October-11 December 2015 in the Magill Library at Haverford College, and Surveying Utopias: A Critical Exploration, which ran in the Henry Madden Library at Fresno State from 22 February-26 July 2019. The exhibition catalogue was published by The Press at California State University (2019) and can be accessed on the Surveying Utopias website. She is the organizer of the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: “Woolf, Modernity, Technology,” which took place at Fresno State from 6-9 June 2024.
I am grateful to Drs. Alexander and Foster for their service to the journal and look forward to working with them over the next three years!
Jennifer L. Airey
University of Tulsa
