UNITAS Journal

UNITAS is an international online peer-reviewed open-access journal of advanced research in literature, culture, and society published bi-annually (May and November).

UNITAS is published by the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines, the oldest modern university in Asia. It is hosted by the Department of Literature, with its editorial address at the Office of the Scholar-in-Residence under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts and Letters. Hard copies are printed on demand or in a limited edition.

History and Coverage

Established in July 1922, UNITAS is one of the oldest extant academic journals published by a university in the Philippines as well as in Asia. Still, UNITAS is perhaps the oldest extant academic journal of its kind in the Philippines and Asia in terms of expansive disciplinary coverage and diverse linguistic representation through the decades. While always cognizant of disciplinary specialization, it has been “multidisciplinary” in publishing scholarship that is intra-disciplinary within the humanities and the arts, and interdisciplinary across the other disciplines. As it was in the beginning, it has aimed for “unitas” by conjoining disciplinary difference through its pages.

Moreover, it has been multilinguistic on the whole, allowing itself to evolve from a journal published purely in Spanish, and then in English, becoming bilingual eventually in the various issues in which articles are written in Spanish and English, or as has been the case in the last several decades, in English and Filipino. And, of late, UNITAS has also published articles in other languages.

Apart from its disciplinary inclusiveness and crossovers, in almost 100 years of its existence, UNITAS has expanded the conceptual terrain of academic and topical coverage. It has published on cutting-edge and time-honored topics in which both established and emerging voices in research and scholarship are heard in articles that range across traditions, modernities, movements, philosophies, themes, politics, geographies, histories, musical types, architectural styles, gender relations, sexualities, government and non-government institutions, educational philosophies, media, forms, genres, canons, pedagogies, literary and cultural relations, and comparative studies, among others, in book review essays, critical commentaries, scholarly papers, and monographs. Such an expansiveness has allowed for establishing new lines of inquiry or exploring new lines of thinking about old ones.

Editorial Policy

UNITAS invites work of outstanding quality by scholars and researchers from a variety of disciplinary, intradisciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary principles, protocols and perspectives for its readership consisting primarily of academics, researchers, and graduate students, as well as of a diverse public consisting of scholars and leaders who are at the forefront of their fields and advocacies, undertaking research on multidisciplinary aspects of national and global issues within and beyond academia broadly from the perspective of but not limited to the human sciences.

In general, UNITAS aims to publish leading-edge and challenging articles and monographs in regular and special issues in relation to the critical currents and themes of the nation, the Asian region and the world which try to meet the various problems and opportunities of today’s globalization.

Although single-authorship of articles remains typical, UNITAS encourages the submission of papers that are co-written by authors working across multicultural and multilinguistic settings, which have resulted from an inter-cultural, inter-regional or inter-national collaboration of researchers in an effort to internationalize knowledge production, circulation, and reception.

In particular, under the rubric of literary and cultural studies in Asia, UNITAS aims to be a platform for ethically engaged studies that represent intersections of national and international literatures, arts and cultures, crisscrossing critical and creative categories, authors and readers, “East” and “West,” “North” and” South,” text and context, close readings and fieldwork, original works and translations, and theoretical and practical methodologies.

Editorial Staff

Maria Luisa Torres Reyes
maria.luisa.reyes@ust.edu.ph
Editor-in-Chief

Joyce L. Arriola
joyce.arriola@ust.edu.ph
Associate Editor

Maria Eloisa S. Perez
msperez@ust.edu.ph
Assistant Editor

Production and Editorial Team

Jan Marvin Goh
jagoh@ust.edu.ph

Rae Francis Quilantang
rcquilantang@ust.edu.ph