Cincinnati Romance Review

About Cincinnati Romance Review

About Cincinnati Romance Review

The Cincinnati Romance Review is a peer-reviewed electronic journal of Romance languages, literatures and cultures, published by the Department of Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures at the University of Cincinnati in the United States. Founded in 1981–82, it is one of the longer-lived departmental journals in North American Romance studies, and it has been published electronically since 2008. The journal carries the print ISSN 0883-9816 and the online ISSN 2155-8817, and it welcomes original articles and reviews on any subject related to Romance languages, literatures and cultures, written in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian.

The journal grew out of the University of Cincinnati's annual Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures, and its early print volumes largely published papers first read at that conference. Its centre of gravity remains the literatures and cultures of the French-, Hispanic-, Italian- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, together with the teaching of Romance languages and literatures. The current issue listed on the journal's website, Volume 57 (Spring 2025), is a monographic issue on women poets from Latin America and Spain — a good illustration of the journal's continuing mix of Hispanic and wider Romance scholarship.

Journal Profile at a Glance

• Full title: Cincinnati Romance Review
• Print ISSN: 0883-9816
• Online ISSN: 2155-8817
• ISO 4 abbreviation: Cincinnati Roman. Rev.
• OCLC number: 609592682
• Publisher: Department of Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures, University of Cincinnati
• Country: United States
• Founded: 1981–82; electronic publication since 2008
• Executive Editor: Mauricio Espinoza (per the journal's website)
• Languages of publication: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian
• Licence of the current electronic edition: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (per the journal's website)
• DOAJ listing: Not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (checked via the DOAJ search API for both ISSNs)

History and Development

The journal's own front matter from its print era states the founding arrangement plainly: the Cincinnati Romance Review was an annual publication of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures of the University of Cincinnati, publishing articles drawn from papers read at the annual Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures, with essays focused on topics of French, Hispanic, Italian or Portuguese literature and on the teaching of Romance languages or literatures. The 1989 volume (Volume VIII) was produced under Executive Editor Heather M. Arden, and the 1992 volume (Volume XI) under Editor Jean-Charles Seigneurel with Kathryn M. Lorenz — names that mark the journal's deep roots in the department's faculty. Copyright in the print volumes rested with the journal itself, and the office of publication was the department at Mail Location 377, Cincinnati, Ohio.

The move online changed the journal's reach without changing its identity. The University of Cincinnati records that the journal has been published electronically since 2008, and the department — now named the Department of Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures — continues to publish it from the same campus address, PO Box 210377, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0377. Wikipedia's record of the journal notes María Paz Moreno as editor-in-chief in its 2023 retrieval; the journal's current website names Mauricio Espinoza, Associate Professor of Spanish, as Executive Editor, with Beatriz Brenes Mora as Assistant Editor. Espinoza's research areas — Central American literary and cultural studies, Latinx popular culture and migration — are visible in the journal's recent contents, which lean strongly toward Latin American and Latinx topics alongside the wider Romance field.

Volume numbering illustrates the journal's longevity: the Spring 2025 issue is presented as Volume 57 and is devoted, as a monographic issue, to women poets from Latin America and Spain, with contributions on Carmen Conde, Gioconda Belli, Delmira Agustini, Francisca Aguirre, Alejandra Pizarnik and contemporary Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latina literature, plus book reviews of recent scholarship on Central American literatures and on gay masculinities in contemporary Spanish culture. A departmental journal that began as a conference proceedings outlet now functions as a fully electronic, internationally authored venue — its Spring 2025 contributors are based at universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Spain and Cuba.

Aims and Scope

The journal invites original submissions and reviews on any subject related to Romance languages, literatures and cultures. Within that broad remit, its historical core comprises the literatures of the French, Hispanic, Italian and Portuguese traditions and the pedagogy of Romance languages. The scope is comparative in practice: because the journal accepts work in five languages and reads across the Romance world, studies that connect traditions — Spanish and Portuguese colonial writing, French and Italian literary relations, transatlantic Hispanic topics, Latinx studies — sit naturally here.

Authors should note what the journal is not. It is a literary and cultural studies venue, not a linguistics journal in the formal sense and not a general humanities review; the department's conference heritage means literary analysis, cultural history and language-teaching scholarship are the established genres. The monographic-issue tradition also matters: themed volumes, such as the Spring 2025 issue on women poets, recur in the journal's history, and prospective authors do well to check whether a forthcoming theme matches their work.

Editorial Leadership

The journal's website introduces its editors directly. The Executive Editor is Mauricio Espinoza, Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance and Arabic Languages, Niehoff Professor in Film and Media Studies, and Director of the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies Program at the University of Cincinnati; he holds MA and PhD degrees in Latin American literary and cultural studies from Ohio State University and co-edited the bilingual anthology En el corazón de todo / In the Heart of It All (2024) and volumes on Central American migrations and Central American film. The Assistant Editor is Beatriz Brenes Mora, a PhD candidate in Spanish at the university. Earlier editorial leadership recorded in reference sources includes editor-in-chief María Paz Moreno, and the print-era volumes name Heather M. Arden, Jean-Charles Seigneurel and Kathryn M. Lorenz — continuity that reflects the journal's departmental, faculty-led character.

Metrics and Indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography (the Modern Language Association Database), the standard bibliographic service for literary studies, per the journal's reference record. Scopus coverage has been intermittent: reference sources citing Scopus source details record coverage from 2012 to 2019 and again in 2022, after which coverage was discontinued; SCImago-derived summaries report the coverage as 2012–2019 and 2022–2024. Authors whose institutions require current Scopus indexing should treat this history carefully and verify status directly with Scopus.

SCImago's Scopus-based indicators, as reported by Resurchify, give the journal an SJR of 0.101, an h-index of 4, and classification in Literature and Literary Theory, with a best quartile of Q4 in the most recent data; an earlier SCImago snapshot reported by ResearchBite showed SJR 0.105 and an h-index of 3. This site's earlier directory record carried an h-index of 5 and a Q3 label, which do not match the SCImago-derived figures and should be read as unverified. OpenAlex holds no source record for either of the journal's ISSNs — direct resolution of both ISSNs returned no source — so OpenAlex works and citation counts for this title could not be verified, and no Journal Impact Factor is claimed for the journal in any source consulted. The journal is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals: clean DOAJ search-API queries for ISSN 2155-8817 and ISSN 0883-9816 returned zero results on repeated runs, even though the electronic edition is freely readable and carries a Creative Commons licence.

Submitting to Cincinnati Romance Review

The journal's submission guidance, published by the department, is specific and should be followed exactly. Submissions are welcomed at any time. Articles and reviews must comply with MLA style (eighth edition): parenthetical references with a bibliography, notes kept to a minimum, and the main text, quotations, notes and bibliography all double-spaced, with titles of books and journals in italics. The preferred length for articles is 8,000 words including bibliography and notes; the preferred length for book reviews is 1,000 words, and review proposals should be discussed with the editor before writing.

A complete article submission consists of a cover sheet and one MS Word file containing the title, an 80-word summary, five keywords, and the article with notes and bibliography. To guarantee anonymity in review, the author's name must not appear anywhere on the paper itself, while the paper's title must appear in the document header. Submissions are sent electronically to the editor named on the journal's submissions page (currently Mauricio Espinoza). Because the journal publishes in five languages, authors may write in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian; the MLA formatting requirements apply regardless of language. Prospective contributors should also examine a recent issue first — the editors explicitly recommend it as the model for format — and monographic issues mean that fit with a forthcoming theme can matter as much as general scope.

Inside a Recent Issue

Volume 57 (Spring 2025), the monographic issue on women poets from Latin America and Spain, shows the journal's present-day range in concrete terms. Its articles include Isabel Gómez Sobrino (East Tennessee State University) on the autobiographical interruption in Carmen Conde's Júbilos; Ivelisse Urbán (Tarleton State University) on the everyday in Gioconda Belli's mature poetry; Mariana C. Zinni (Queens College, CUNY) on María de Estrada and the bulls of Mexico; Veronika Bílková (University of Ostrava) on the modernist landscape in Delmira Agustini; Alexa Melissa Hurtado Montaño (Texas A&M University) on decolonial aesthetics, the Muntú philosophy and santería as tools of resistance in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latina literature; Elia Saneleuterio (Universitat de València) on Francisca Aguirre's citations and dedications; work by Paulina Marlen Casañas Oliva (Universidad de Pinar del Río) and Jesús A. Meza-Morales (Universidad Nebrija) on three centuries of Cuban women's poetry; and Josué Brocca (University of Cambridge) reading Alejandra Pizarnik against the concretistas through silence, iconotextuality and negative metapoetics. Book reviews cover Sophie Esch's edited volume Central American Literatures as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2024), reviewed by Nicasio Urbina, and Iker González-Allende's Masculinidades gays y maricas en la cultura española contemporánea (Egales, 2024), reviewed by Juan A. Godoy-Peñas.

Three features of that table of contents deserve an author's attention. First, the geographical spread: contributors write from the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Czech Republic and Cuba, so the journal is an international venue despite its departmental base. Second, the linguistic spread: titles and topics move between Spanish-language primary texts and English-language criticism, consistent with the journal's five-language policy. Third, the balance of periods: Golden Age and colonial material (María de Estrada) sits alongside modernist, twentieth-century and contemporary work, confirming that the journal's scope is the whole Romance tradition rather than a single century. The monographic format also signals an editorial preference for clustered conversations — a themed issue built around a coherent topic — that authors can use when framing a submission or proposing a review.

The Journal's Place in Romance Studies

Departmental journals occupy a distinct ecological niche in literary studies. They are typically faculty- and graduate-student-run, they survive on institutional commitment rather than subscriptions, and they often preserve a relationship with a conference or a regional scholarly community. The Cincinnati Romance Review fits that pattern and has outlasted most of its peers: founded in the early 1980s as the publication outlet of the Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures, it moved online in 2008 — earlier than many comparable titles — and continues to publish under the department's current name. Its listing in the MLA International Bibliography places it inside the discipline's standard discovery infrastructure, which matters more for a literary journal's working visibility than commercial citation rankings.

Its citation footprint, on the Scopus-based evidence, is small: an SJR around 0.10 and a Scopus h-index in the low single digits, with recent Scopus citation counts near zero. That profile is normal for a specialist literary review publishing much of its content in languages other than English and in article genres — close readings, thematic studies, book reviews — that accumulate citations slowly. Authors should therefore evaluate the journal as scholars in the field do: by the quality of its editorial home, its indexing in the MLA bibliography, its four-decade continuity, and the fit between their manuscript and its Romance-studies readership, rather than by headline metrics. Conversely, authors who require a current Scopus listing or a Journal Impact Factor for a specific institutional evaluation should note the discontinued Scopus coverage and the absence of a JCR factor, and choose accordingly.

Access, Licensing and the Back Archive

The journal's current electronic edition is free to read on the University of Cincinnati's site, and the journal page states that the work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License: readers may share the material with attribution, for non-commercial purposes, without derivatives. That licence is more restrictive than the CC BY terms many open access journals now use, and authors should read it before submitting if they plan to reuse their own article elsewhere. No submission fee or article processing charge is published in the sources consulted for this profile, and any charge could not be verified; as a departmentally published journal, the title operates outside the commercial APC model, but authors should confirm the current position with the editorial office if the question matters to them.

The print-era archive survives through the University of Cincinnati's institutional repository, which hosts digitised front matter and volumes from the journal's first decades — the 1989 and 1992 volumes consulted for this profile among them — preserving the record of the journal's conference-era contents, mastheads and production history. Combined with the electronic run from 2008 onward on the department's site, the journal's four decades of publication remain accessible, which is not true of every departmental title of its generation. For researchers tracing the history of Romance studies in the United States, that archive is itself a primary source: its mastheads document generations of Cincinnati faculty, and its tables of contents chart the field's shifting centre of gravity from European philology toward Latin American, Latinx and transatlantic cultural studies — the same shift visible in the Spring 2025 monographic issue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Cincinnati Romance Review?
Print ISSN 0883-9816 and online ISSN 2155-8817, as printed on the journal's University of Cincinnati page.

Who publishes Cincinnati Romance Review?
The Department of Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures of the University of Cincinnati, from PO Box 210377, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0377.

When was the journal founded, and when did it go online?
It was founded in 1981–82 and has been published electronically since 2008.

Who is the editor?
The journal's website names Mauricio Espinoza as Executive Editor, with Beatriz Brenes Mora as Assistant Editor. Reference records from 2023 name María Paz Moreno as editor-in-chief.

In which languages can I publish?
English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian.

Is Cincinnati Romance Review indexed in Scopus?
Coverage has been intermittent — recorded as 2012–2019 and 2022 in Scopus source details cited by reference sources, with SCImago-derived data extending the second run to 2024 — and coverage was reported discontinued after 2022. Verify the current status with Scopus before relying on it. The journal is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

How long should an article be?
The preferred length is 8,000 words including bibliography and notes; book reviews are preferably 1,000 words, proposed to the editor in advance.

Does the journal charge a submission or publication fee?
No fee is published in the sources consulted for this profile and none could be verified; the journal is published by a university department rather than a commercial publisher. Confirm with the editorial office if you need a definitive answer.

Sources

• Cincinnati Romance Review official journal page, University of Cincinnati (artsci.uc.edu/crr.html) — editors, current issue, ISSNs, licence
• Cincinnati Romance Review submissions page, Department of Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures, University of Cincinnati
• Cincinnati Romance Review print front matter, Volumes VIII (1989) and XI (1992), University of Cincinnati repository (scholar.uc.edu)
• Wikipedia, "Cincinnati Romance Review" — history, editorship, MLA and Scopus indexing record
• SCImago-derived data via Resurchify and ResearchBite (SJR, h-index, categories, coverage)
• DOAJ search API queries for ISSN 2155-8817 and 0883-9816 (zero results, repeated clean runs); OpenAlex ISSN resolution for both ISSNs (no source record)