Duke University Press is one of the most distinctive university presses in scholarly publishing. Founded in 1921 as Trinity College Press and renamed Duke University Press in 1926, this non-profit publisher based in Durham, North Carolina publishes around 60 peer-reviewed journals and roughly 150 books a year. Its journals list is the definitive home of critical theory, area studies, and gender and queer studies - titles like Public Culture, Social Text, boundary 2, South Atlantic Quarterly, and GLQ have shaped entire fields - alongside major disciplinary journals such as American Literature, Ethnohistory, Comparative Literature, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. It also publishes a small but prestigious mathematics list anchored by the Duke Mathematical Journal, distributed through Project Euclid.

This guide covers what Duke University Press publishes, how its open-access program works (spoiler: authors almost never pay), the peer-review process, and how to submit.

• ~60 journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. Many are field-defining theory venues; others are society-owned titles the press publishes on behalf of associations (e.g., Demography for the Population Association of America, Ethnohistory for the American Society for Ethnohistory, Hispanic American Historical Review).
• ~150 books per year, with celebrated lists in anthropology, cultural studies, Latin American and Asian studies, Black studies, and music.
• Digital collections - e-Duke Journals and e-Duke Books collections sold to libraries, plus mathematics content on Project Euclid, which Duke University Press co-manages.

Duke University Press takes a deliberately different path from APC-driven publishers. The press states that no single OA model fits all fields, and it prioritizes models that do not ask authors to pay - a stance shaped by how little grant funding humanities scholars typically hold.

Because author-facing fees are rare, LMIC waiver programs and Read & Publish agreements play a much smaller role here than at commercial publishers - library-funded models such as S2O do that work instead. If your funder mandates immediate OA, target one of the fully-OA titles or confirm the current S2O status and self-archiving terms with the journal.

• Model: double-anonymized review is the norm across the humanities and social-science titles, in line with HSS conventions.
• Timeline: expect several months; Public Culture, for example, tells authors review can take up to six months, with publication typically 12-15 months after acceptance.
• Editorial culture: many journals are run by active scholar-editors and editorial collectives, so fit with the journal's intellectual project matters as much as technical soundness.

1. Pick the journal and read recent issues - Duke University Press journals have strong editorial identities.
2. Read the submission guidelines on the journal's page at dukeupress.edu; length limits and style vary by title.
3. Format your manuscript. Most titles follow the Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition) - notes-and-bibliography at many humanities journals, author-date at others such as Public Culture. SciSpace templates handle the formatting for you.
4. Submit via ScholarOne Manuscripts for most journals (e.g., Public Culture at mc04.manuscriptcentral.com); some smaller titles accept submissions by editorial-office email, and society-owned titles like Demography submit through the society's own portal.
5. Respond to reviews - revise-and-resubmit is common and often substantive at theory-driven journals.

Duke University Press follows COPE-aligned publication-ethics practices across its journals: disclosed conflicts of interest, permissions for third-party material, and corrections and retractions handled through the journal editorial offices. Authors of subscription articles sign a publication agreement; open-access articles carry Creative Commons licenses (CC BY or CC BY-NC, varying by title).