The University of Pennsylvania Press - Penn Press - is one of the oldest university presses in the United States, incorporated in Philadelphia on 26 March 1890 and wholly owned by the University of Pennsylvania as a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation. It publishes roughly 27 peer-reviewed journals alongside more than 120 new books a year, with a backlist of about 2,000 active titles.

Penn Press is a humanities and social-sciences house. Its journals cluster around early American history and culture, medieval and early modern studies, Jewish studies, intellectual history, human rights, and Romance-language literatures. Several are published on behalf of scholarly societies and research institutions rather than owned outright - Dissent for the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, the Journal of the Early Republic for SHEAR, Huntington Library Quarterly for the Huntington Library, and The Jewish Quarterly Review for Penn's Katz Center. If you work in STEM, Penn Press is almost certainly not your venue; if you work in the humanities, it is a serious one.

Penn Press journals are narrow and period-specific by design. Fit matters more here than at a large multidisciplinary publisher: an editor will desk-reject a good article that sits outside the journal's period or region. Use the guide below to narrow your options before you write a cover letter.

Journals (~27). Almost all are humanities or humanistic social science, most published quarterly or three times a year, most tied to a period, region, or society. Article lengths of 8,000-12,000 words are normal, and long-form book reviews and review essays are a substantial part of most issues.

Books (120+ per year). Penn Press book lists are strongest in American history and culture, ancient, medieval and Renaissance studies, human rights, Jewish studies, anthropology, political science, and landscape architecture. The Press published W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro in 1899.

Wharton School Press. Wharton's business-book publisher became a Penn Press imprint in July 2023, adding a management and business-strategy list to an otherwise humanities-centered catalog.

Penn Press journals are hosted and distributed through the Scholarly Publishing Collective, the shared services platform for non-profit presses, with archival runs also available through JSTOR and Project MUSE.

Penn Press journals are subscription- and society-funded, not APC-funded. That is the single most important practical difference between publishing here and publishing with a large commercial STM house.

Because charges vary by title and change, treat any figure you find secondhand as provisional and check the journal's own author page or write to the editorial office.

Penn Press journals use double-anonymized peer review as the standard model: reviewers do not see the author's identity and authors do not see reviewers'. Prepare an anonymized manuscript with identifying references stripped from the text, the notes, and the file metadata.

Practical expectations for a humanities journal of this size:

• Editors screen for fit first, and desk rejection on scope is common and fast.
• Two external readers is the norm; three when readers disagree.
• Review takes months, not weeks - three to six months to a first decision is typical, and longer is not unusual for a small editorial office working with volunteer readers.
• Revise-and-resubmit is a real outcome rather than a soft rejection; substantive R&Rs frequently end in acceptance.
• Dissent does not work this way at all. It commissions and edits like a magazine; approach the editors with a pitch.

1. Confirm scope. Read two recent issues of your target journal. Period, region, and method fit is the most common reason for rejection.
2. Check the journal's own author guidelines. Each Penn Press journal sets its own word limits, note style, and submission route; the Press does not run one universal set of rules.
3. Format to Chicago style. Chicago notes-and-bibliography is the house expectation across the Penn Press journals list, usually with endnotes rather than parenthetical citation.
4. Anonymize the manuscript. Remove your name from the document and its properties, and neutralize self-citations.
5. Submit through the route the journal names. Penn Press has no single portal - individual titles use an online submission system or a dedicated editorial-office email address, and society-published journals often run their own. Confirm the current route on the journal's page before sending.
6. Expect to wait, and ask politely. A status query after three to four months is reasonable.

Penn Press is a member of the Association of University Presses and follows standard scholarly-publishing norms on authorship, correction, and retraction; its journals apply COPE-aligned practice on misconduct allegations. Copyright is typically transferred to the Press or to the partner society, with author reuse and self-archiving rights specified in the publication agreement. Image permissions and clearance for quoted or reproduced material are the author's responsibility, and for humanities work with illustrations this is a real and often underestimated cost - start clearing rights early.