Journal of the Southwest
Journal of the Southwest was founded in 1959 as Arizona and the West, the first journal of Western American history in the United States, and began publishing in its current format in 1987 as a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed quarterly dedicated to an integrated regional study of the American Southwest, northern Mexico, and the US-Mexico borderlands. For more than half a century it has stood alone in general academic publishing: an award-winning journal representing a transborder region of world-historical significance. As of 2025, Journal of the Southwest publishes two open-access online issues per year, with content ranging broadly across disciplines including intellectual and social history, gender and women’s studies, LGBTQ studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, folklore, politics, borderlands studies, literature, photography and cinema, geography, and natural history and ecology.
Reading JSW
Issues of Journal of the Southwest are published on Project Muse. Since August 2024 (Volume 66, #3), journal content has been published open access and free for anyone to access and read. JSW content published prior to the move to fully open access publication is available by license or purchase.
Submitting to JSW
This site is used solely for submitting manuscripts to the journal. See the Submission page for information about the submission process and guidelines.
About the Journal
The University of Arizona’s Southwest Center has sustained a program of exemplary publication on the region since 1987 and launch of Journal of the Southwest, under the direction of founding editor, Joseph C. Wilder. With JSW and with two university press book series, the Center has built substantially on a publishing tradition that began in 1959 with the western historical quarterly, Arizona and the West (ISSN 0004-1408), published out of the UA history department. Marking the beginning of a new and ambitious approach to publishing on the Southwest, in 1987 Wilder launched Journal of the Southwest with a short essay, writing:
It is the peculiar ambition of JSW to pay attention to the histories of tradition and change which so define this unique region. By so doing, it is our scholarly hope that better, more unified understandings of our region—its peoples, its past and present—will emerge through the vehicle of literate and scholarly writing on the Southwest …. Journal of the Southwest is a comprehensive publication with a special consciousness of place. We hope that you—scholar and general reader alike—will turn to it as a source of the best critical thinking and scholarship on the region.
JSW has remained faithful to this overall vision, and in particular to the notion of a special consciousness of place, ever since.
Journal of the Southwest is published in association with the Consortium for Southwest Studies: Austin College, Colorado College, Fort Lewis College, Southern Methodist University, Texas State University, University of Arizona, University of New Mexico, and University of Texas at Arlington.