Home
About the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
The Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (JSAMES) is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal hosted at Villanova University’s Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS). For several decades, the JSAMES has produced scholarship on the countries of South and Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and the interconnections that bring the people and states of these areas together. In 2026, a renewed vision of JSAMES is launched, which expands the geographic, epistemological, and disciplinary boundaries of area studies such as South Asian or Middle Eastern Studies to bring these fields into shared dialogue.
The JSAMES will encourage interdisciplinary scholarship that is grounded in multi-sited and multi-lingual approaches to understanding the world. Such commitments will allow us to foster scholarship that complicates and challenges various binaries present in the study of these regions, such as littoral/inland, urban/rural, maritime/terrestrial, and religious/secular, in favor of scholarship that focuses on how these are co-constituted and how other spaces of contact and encounter emerge from within the macro-region. Taking the South Asian and Middle Eastern macro-region as the starting point for thinking through the world encourages authors to think across geographies and languages and to account for the various routes, exchanges, flows, and networks that shape lifeworlds in this vast region and beyond, including in the diaspora. The JSAMES will highlight how the macro-regional scale creates new meanings around politics, identity, and belonging that shape the subjectivities of individuals and collectives.
About the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS)
Villanova University’s Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS) is the official sponsor of the Journal, commited to supporting on-campus workshops, public events, development editing opportunities, and co-sponsored conferences to foster a scholarly community centered around the Journal.
To this end, for those interested in publishing their work in the JSAMES and who could benefit from pre-submission feedback, each academic year the CAIS will sponsor: (a) a Fall and Spring workshop to produce a research forum section of the journal, and, (b) a Fall and Spring workshop for advanced doctoral or early career scholars. Attendees of such workshops will benefit from structured feedback and the support of at least one editorial board member who will support them throughout the submission and review process. The CAIS also holds regular public events throughout the academic year to highlight the scholarship of the JSAMES editorial board and journal contributors. Finally, the CAIS co-sponsors external workshops to support contributions from scholars based in Global South institutions.
Please contact the managing editor Dina Baslan (dina.baslan@villanova.edu) if you are interested in participating in any of these opportunities.
Journal Information
Publication model: By subsription
Publishing formats: Digital and print
Publication frequency: Quarterly
Peer Review model: Double blind
Publication fee
Individuals
Print only: 45 USD
Institutions
Online only: 130 USD
Print only: 150 USD
Online and Print: 200 USD
Sponsors and Affiliated Institutions
Villanova University’s Center for Arab and Islamic Studies