Studies in Late Antiquity

About Studies in Late Antiquity

Studies in Late Antiquity — Journal Profile

Studies in Late Antiquity, abbreviated SLA, is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by the University of California Press in the United States. It is devoted to the world of late antiquity, conventionally dated to about 150–750 CE, and it was created to give that period a journal of its own that is global and interdisciplinary in outlook rather than confined to the classical Mediterranean. The journal released its first issue in February 2017, and University of California, Santa Barbara described it at launch as the first fully online publication in its field. It appears four times a year. Its electronic ISSN is 2470-2048, the identifier carried on this JournalsWorld record, and it also has a print ISSN, 2470-6469, which appears on the publisher's issue pages; the stored record for this post lists the electronic ISSN only, so the print ISSN is recorded in this profile as a correction-pass item. For historians, archaeologists, classicists, scholars of religion and everyone else who works on the centuries between the high Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages, SLA is one of the defining venues of the field, distinctive for the breadth of the world it treats as late antique.

At a Glance

• Full title: Studies in Late Antiquity (SLA)
• Publisher: University of California Press, United States
• Electronic ISSN: 2470-2048
• Print ISSN: 2470-6469 (shown on the publisher's issue pages; missing from the stored record)
• Publishing since: 2017 (Volume 1, Issue 1, February 2017)
• Frequency: 4 issues per year (March, June, September, December)
• Language: English
• Field: late antique studies — history, archaeology, classics, religious studies, art history and neighbouring disciplines
• Founding editor: Elizabeth DePalma Digeser (University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Co-editors: Ra'anan Boustan and Kristina Sessa, per the publisher's submission page
• Access model: subscription journal published online, with an open access option for individual articles and print-on-demand copies of issues
• Website: online.ucpress.edu/sla

Identity and Publication History

The journal's founding is unusually well documented. In October 2016 the University of California, Santa Barbara announced that its professor of history Elizabeth DePalma Digeser would serve as founding editor of a new journal, Studies in Late Antiquity, for the University of California Press, with the first issue to appear in February 2017. The announcement set out the programme that still defines the journal: scholarship on a wide range of topics pertaining to the world of late antiquity, dated 150 to 750 CE, with a defining focus on multi- and interdisciplinary research that emphasises the interconnectedness of the Mediterranean with other parts of the late ancient world, and a particular welcome for comparative and methodologically innovative papers. That programme was printed in the front matter of the first issue itself, so the journal's identity was fixed in public from its first pages.

The timing mattered. By 2017 late antiquity had grown from a specialist corner of classics and ancient history into one of the most dynamic fields in the humanities, drawing in archaeologists working from Britain to Central Asia, historians of early Christianity, Judaism and Islam, art historians, numismatists, papyrologists and scholars of Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Persian and Arabic traditions. What the field lacked was a journal built for that whole map. The established Journal of Late Antiquity, founded a decade earlier at Johns Hopkins, had shown the demand; SLA added a second flagship with a more explicitly global and comparative remit, an online-first format, and a reviews programme that treats exhibitions and digital projects as part of the scholarly record alongside books. The journal has kept the quarterly rhythm announced at launch — four issues a year, dated March, June, September and December — and reached its ninth volume in 2025, with special issues that have become field events in their own right.

Editorial leadership has turned over once. Digeser led the journal from its founding; in the summer of 2022 the press welcomed Kristina Sessa, professor of history at Ohio State University, to the editorial team as co-editor, and her inaugural editorial, "Keep Late Antiquity Weird," set out an agenda of expanding the journal's global review coverage, publishing special volumes on questions such as race in premodern cultures and the use of paleoscientific methods, and opening the journal to a more diverse body of contributors. The publisher's current submission page directs editorial inquiries to Ra'anan Boustan and Kristina Sessa jointly, and it is to those two co-editors that this profile attributes the journal's present leadership. Under them the journal launched an Academic Mentorship Program feature, Emerging Scholars of Late Antiquity, in which work by high-school and undergraduate authors, developed with faculty mentors, is published in the journal — an unusual pipeline initiative for a field journal, and a sign of how the editors understand SLA's community role.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The publisher's submission page states the journal's territory precisely. SLA encourages submissions from scholars working in, and on the languages of, a long list of regions during the period 150–750 CE: Africa, Anatolia, Arabia, the Baltic, the British Isles, Central and Western Asia, China, Europe, India, the Mediterranean, Persia and Scandinavia. The fields and topics it names are equally broad: archaeology; cultural geography, including cartography; economics; gender and sexuality; history, including cultural history; history of the arts, including architecture, art and music; law; literature and rhetoric; material culture, including codicology, epigraphy, numismatics and papyrology; historical demography; philology; philosophy; religion; science, including medicine and technology; and theology. Few humanities journals print a scope that runs from Baltic archaeology to Chinese sources and from demography to theology; the list is the journal's founding argument in miniature, namely that late antiquity is a connected world system and should be studied as one.

In practice, an SLA issue mixes several kinds of content. Research articles are the core. Review essays take stock of larger debates. Book reviews, handled by a team of book review editors, assess current publications for specialists and for wider audiences; the journal does not accept unsolicited reviews, but welcomes suggestions of books and projects to review. Exhibition reviews are a signature section: timely scholarly responses to exhibitions of art, artefacts and architectural material in venues from large national museums to small galleries and digital formats, usually published after an exhibition closes and engaging with its catalogue where one exists. Special issues gather the field around a theme — recent examples include a special issue on paleoscience and the study of late antiquity, which brought historians together with climate and disease science, and one on new material perspectives on late antique urbanism, which re-read the late antique city through social anthropology and postprocessual archaeology rather than the older narrative of decline. The range of content is deliberate: the journal wants to be, in its co-editor's words, a central conversational space for the big questions that drive the scholarship, not only a repository for narrowly focused essays, welcome as those also are.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

Day-to-day leadership rests with the co-editors named above, supported by book review editors for the reviews programme and a named exhibition review editor — the publisher's reviewer guidance directs exhibition suggestions to that editor directly. The journal's peer review begins, as its submission page explains, with the editors reading a manuscript on arrival to confirm that it is appropriate for the journal before it goes further; assessment then applies the journal's published criteria, which centre on the contribution a paper makes to late antique scholarship, the quality of its sources and methods, and its fit with the journal's interdisciplinary and comparative ambitions. Reviews follow their own conventions: book reviews open with full bibliographic information for the book and are judged partly on their value as a pedagogical tool, and exhibition reviews open with the exhibition's title, venue, location and full run of dates. Authors whose papers are accepted sign an Author Agreement with the press, and the journal maintains a published Statement on Publication Ethics. A reader who wants to understand how SLA is run will find the machinery unusually visible on the publisher's site, from the submission criteria to the mentorship programme for emerging scholars.

Publishing Model, Frequency and Access

SLA is published four times a year by the University of California Press, the publishing arm of the University of California, whose journals programme is one of the largest university-press lists in the humanities and social sciences. The journal was born digital: issues appear online on the press's journal platform, and the press also makes individual issues obtainable in print-on-demand form, a model its blog recommends to readers who want a paper copy of a special issue. The standard route to reading SLA is a subscription, held by very many university libraries, and the press actively encourages readers to ask their librarian to subscribe where no subscription exists. Alongside the subscription model, authors have the option of publishing their article open access; the publisher maintains a dedicated page explaining that option and its article processing charge, and authors considering it should read the current figures there, because the charge itself could not be verified from the pages fetched for this profile and is therefore not stated as a number here. There is no charge simply to submit or to publish by the ordinary subscription route described on the journal's pages, beyond the optional open access route — but any fee question is best settled on the publisher's current pages before submission, since press policies change.

Metrics and Standing

Two independent citation pictures are available for SLA, and this profile reports both with their sources, because they measure different databases over different windows. OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint to the source record S4210226668 at the time of checking, credits the journal with 366 works and 520 citations, an h-index of 12 and an i10-index of 17, with a two-year mean citedness of about 0.16. The Scopus-based picture carried by SCImago is smaller and younger, as one would expect for a journal founded in 2017: SCImago-derived listings give an SJR of 0.22, a best quartile of Q1 in each of Classics, History and Religious Studies, a Scopus h-index of 8, and Scopus coverage beginning in 2017; a Scopus CiteScore of 0.9 is reported in Scopus-derived listings. The stored JournalsWorld record gives an h-index of 10, between the two database figures; none of the three is an error so much as a reminder that h-indices are properties of databases, not of journals, and that a young journal's numbers move quickly. The substantive point is the quartile pattern: in the Scopus categories that define its field, SLA sits in the first quartile, a strong standing for a journal less than a decade old, and the one most relevant to authors whose institutions assess venues by Scopus quartiles. No listing for the journal was returned by the Directory of Open Access Journals search API at the time of checking, which is expected for a subscription journal with an optional open access route rather than a fully open access model.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's presence in Scopus is established by the SCImago record described above, which is built entirely on Scopus data, and the publisher directs readers to the journal's pages on its site for the complete abstracting and indexing coverage, which is the authoritative list and should be consulted for services beyond Scopus. Articles carry DOIs under the University of California Press prefix 10.1525 — the first issue's lead article, for example, is doi:10.1525/sla.2017.1.1.8 — which makes the journal's content straightforward to cite, link and track in the standard scholarly infrastructure. For a humanities journal, the combination of a major university press platform, Scopus coverage and a vigorous reviews and special-issue programme gives SLA a discoverability well beyond its small annual article count: its review sections in particular are widely read teaching resources, and its special issues are frequently assigned in graduate seminars.

How to Submit

Manuscripts are submitted through the journal's Scholastica site, linked from the publisher's submission page, after reviewing the journal's author guidelines. The editors welcome proposals for special issues under published special-issue proposal guidelines, and editorial inquiries, including special-issue proposals, go to the co-editors at the addresses given on that page. Practical points made by the journal itself are worth underlining. First, fit is assessed at the door: the editors read each submission for appropriateness before review, so a covering explanation of how a paper speaks to the journal's global, interdisciplinary readership is time well spent. Second, work on regions and languages in the journal's stated list — including regions beyond the Mediterranean core — is explicitly encouraged, as is comparative and methodologically innovative work. Third, the reviews sections are commissioned rather than submitted: scholars who hope to review for SLA should suggest publications or projects to the review editors instead of sending a finished review. Fourth, authors new to the field should look at the Emerging Scholars feature and its mentorship programme, which is designed for student work developed with a faculty mentor.

Reading the Journal Well

A practical note for researchers meeting SLA for the first time: because the journal defines its field by a period and a connected world rather than by a single discipline, the most instructive way to sample it is through its special issues and review essays, which are where its editors state what they think the field should argue about next. A newcomer who reads the paleoscience issue alongside the urbanism issue will understand the journal's range — laboratory-informed history at one end, theory-driven archaeology at the other — faster than from any scope statement. The book and exhibition reviews repay the same attention: they are written for working scholars and for teachers, and they map each season's new publications and museum projects across the whole late antique world, including regions and languages a single reader could not otherwise follow.

Similar and Related Journals

Readers comparing venues for late antique research usually weigh SLA against a small set of neighbours. The Journal of Late Antiquity (Johns Hopkins University Press) is the field's other flagship and the closest comparator, with a somewhat more Mediterranean and text-historical centre of gravity — it is a different journal from SLA despite the similar names, and confusing the two is the commonest citation error in this corner of the field. The Journal of Early Christian Studies, also at Johns Hopkins, covers overlapping centuries from the angle of early Christianity. Antiquité Tardive is the long-running French-language annual of the field. For material and archaeological work, the Journal of Roman Archaeology and Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies are frequent alternatives, the latter notably strong for the Byzantine continuation of the late antique world. SLA's distinctive offer within this company is the combination of a global remit, an online-first quarterly rhythm, and review coverage that extends to exhibitions and digital projects.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Studies in Late Antiquity?
The electronic ISSN is 2470-2048, the identifier on this JournalsWorld record and the journal's ISSN-L in OpenAlex; the print ISSN shown on the publisher's issue pages is 2470-6469.

Who publishes Studies in Late Antiquity?
The University of California Press, in the United States. The stored record's publisher field shows a numeric internal code; the publisher of record is the University of California Press.

When did Studies in Late Antiquity begin?
Its first issue appeared in February 2017, under founding editor Elizabeth DePalma Digeser of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

What period does the journal cover?
About 150 to 750 CE, across a region list that runs from the British Isles and the Baltic to China, India, Persia, Arabia and Africa, in all the disciplines named in its scope.

How often does it appear, and who edits it now?
Four issues a year. The publisher's submission page directs editorial inquiries to co-editors Ra'anan Boustan and Kristina Sessa.

Is Studies in Late Antiquity open access?
It is a subscription journal with an optional open access route for individual articles; the press publishes the details and the applicable charge on its open access page. No DOAJ listing was returned for it at the time of checking.

What are its citation metrics?
At the time of checking, OpenAlex gave 366 works, 520 citations and an h-index of 12, while SCImago's Scopus-based listing gave SJR 0.22, Q1 in Classics, History and Religious Studies, and a Scopus h-index of 8. Figures differ by database and date; consult the databases for current values.

How do I submit a manuscript or propose a review?
Research articles go through the journal's Scholastica submission site. Reviews are commissioned: suggest books, projects or exhibitions to the review editors rather than sending an unsolicited review.