About the Journal

Longhand is a digital platform of the Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature, the publication of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. We publish research and creative work that engages any of the DECL’s areas of specialization: literature, language, and creative writing. We also welcome research that adapts or responds to the particulars of its chosen subject matter; that thrives when the lines that typically delimit scholarly and creative work bleed or blur; and that finds suitable ways to be rigorous.

We aim to provide a venue for critical and creative work that is responding to emergent problems in the dynamic fields of English Language and Literature Studies, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing. Our work in these areas is taking us in new directions that call for a wider range of forms, methods, and tools, some of which need to be tested or theorized more extensively. We intend for this kind of work to happen in the pages of our journal. We want to not only highlight but also expand the range of strategies that are available to and in use by Filipino researchers and practitioners working in these fields. The journal’s overall framing of research and writing as practiced by, primarily, Filipino academics and artists will likewise evolve in the process: we will watch, listen, and adapt.

Past and future

The Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature has been publishing for over twenty years, showcasing the excellent scholarship and creative writing that is being produced by members of the department while also featuring the exciting work being done by researchers and practitioners outside the DECL. Now under a new name and with a new digital platform, the journal will continue to publish academic and creative work in traditional formats. It will also celebrate new lines of inquiry and ways of making, taking advantage of digital tools, methodologies, and environments in order to eventually feature multimedia submissions, unconventional scholarly formats, and experimental projects. 

Our name

To write “in longhand” means to write something out in full, in one’s own hand.  We may be moving the journal online, but in many ways we continue to work and write “in longhand.” This entails carefully thinking through what we do and the decisions we make.  At the same time, we understand that processes of inquiry and making can be messy. Longhand drafts acknowledge this, tracking not only the hard work we have done, but also the evolution and swerves in our thinking, tangents, mistakes, attempts to correct, adjust, overcorrect, and adjust again. As we teach students in our core English classes, to write is to think, and the articulation of an evolving process can be as valuable as what this process produces.