About the Press

Interreligious Studies Press (ISP) is an imprint of Interreligious Studies Media, a non-profit whose mission provides spaces for the distribution of critical, constructive, and cutting-edge scholarship and pedagogies related to the field of interreligious/interfaith studies and its adjacent disciplines. These spaces include the Journal of Interreligious Studies, Interreligious Studies Press, webinars, and other digital and print learning materials. 

ISP publishes edited volumes and monographs related to the field of interreligious/interfaith studies and its adjacent disciplines. Its elder sibling, the Journal of Interreligious Studies, has been at the forefront of the field for more than fifteen years and now serves as the journal of record for interreligious/interfaith studies scholarship.

The primary purview of ISP is interreligious studies, which is best defined by Kate McCarthy in Interreligious/Interfaith Studies (Patel, Peace, & Silverman 2018): it is "a subdiscipline of religious studies that engages in the scholarly and religiously neutral description, multidisciplinary analysis, and theoretical framing of the interactions of religiously different people and groups, including the intersections of religion and secularity. It examines these interactions in historical and contemporary contexts, and in relation to other social systems and forces. Like other disciplines with applied dimensions, it serves the public good by bringing its analysis to bear on practical approaches to issues in religiously diverse societies" (12).

ISP also encourages submissions from the related fields of interreligious, intercultural, and comparative theology. 

Finally, the Press seeks to publish edited volumes or monographs that feature careful and critical engagement with how race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and disability intersect with religious identities and communities in the public sphere or secular domain.

Authors

ISP does not accept unsolicited submissions. If you are interested in publishing with us, please email the Editor-at-Large of Interreligious Studies Media, Axel M. Oaks Takacs: axel@irstudies.org. He will work directly with you to answer your questions and explain the process.

Review Process

Manuscripts will undergo a threefold editorial review process. First, the manuscript proposal will be desk reviewed by the Editor-at-Large. If it is found to fall within the purview of ISP's publishing interests and its academic standards, it will then be reviewed by ISP's Editorial Board. If they agree to move forward with the manuscript, then we will invite the author(s) or editor(s) to submit their manuscript for blind peer review. At this stage, the manuscript—monograph or individual chapters for an edited volume—will be anonymously peer reviewed by at least two outside reviewers.

Copyright, Rights, and Permissions

ISP is an open-access press. As a condition of publication in Interreligious Studies Press (ISP) all authors agree to the following terms of licensing/copyright ownership:

  • First publication rights to original work accepted for publication is granted to ISP, but copyright for all work published by ISP is retained by the author(s).
  • Works published in ISP will be distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC International 4.0). By granting a CC-BY-NC license in their work, authors retain copyright ownership of the work, but they give explicit permission for others to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the work, as long as the original source and author(s) are properly cited (i.e. a complete bibliographic citation and link to the ISP website) and the use is for noncommercial purposes. No permission is required from the author(s) or the publishers for such use.
  • Authors may enter into separate, additional contractual agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in ISP.
  • Authors are permitted to post their work online in institutional/disciplinary repositories or on their own websites. Pre-print versions posted online should include a citation and link to the final published version in ISP as soon as the issue is available; post-print versions (including the final publisher's PDF) should include a citation and link to the ISP's website.
  • It will be the responsibility of the authors to secure all necessary copyright permissions for the use of third-party materials in their manuscript. Authors will be required to provide written evidence of this permission upon acceptance of their manuscript

Preservation and Archiving

ISP recognizes the importance of preserving scholarly content for the long term. Our Preservation and Archiving Policy ensures that all published books remain accessible, discoverable, and protected against data loss. All content published by ISP is indexed and preserved in the following systems:

  • ATLA Religion Database
  • PKP Preservation Network
  • Our own website