Call for Papers

Compass: An Undergraduate Journal of American Political Ideas

Compass is an outlet for essays that resonate with current American political issues understood in the broad contexts of political philosophy, history, literature, and culture. The online platform facilitates our mission to convey excellent essays to a broader interested public. Our authors come from diverse institutions, from top research institutions, to regional state school, and private liberal arts colleges.

We hope that participating in an exchange of politically relevant ideas anchored in thoughtful intellectual analysis links our authors’ love of learning to efficacious civic engagement through public debate.

Online Submissions

Please submit your article to Compass by submitting it to our editorial system at Digital Commons. You can register and submit your article by using the button below.

Submission Details

We encourage short (1500 to 2000 words) papers -often transformed from term papers or theses – that do a great job communicating ideas to a general public. Undergraduate researchers have the opportunity to consider and convey their academic work beyond the classroom setting in which it was incubated. Compass editors help undergraduate authors edit their work, which is a very useful experience for students interested in graduate school or a career where writing is central.

Please encourage your excellent students to submit their work to Compass. We are also interested in symposia and other multi-author submissions organized around particular themes or books. Perhaps course assignments could result in interesting exchanges that might be published by Compass. These symposia are usually 2000-3000 words made up of several shorter comments, which read as conversations or short exchanges of various points of view.