The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) was invited by JSTOR to be part of a special cooperation with the world-famous Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. The world-leading institute, made a collection of over 2700 chapters and articles on Black Studies available for free worldwide via JSTOR, for two years. The editors of HJEAS signed on enthusiastically and submitted four articles from the Journal.
Dr. Péter Gaál-Szabó, member of the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Debrecen, contributed two articles, titled “Zora Neale Hurston's Cultural Space and African American Spatiality”, and “Luminal Places and Zora Neale Hurston's Religio-Cultural Space in ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and ‘Jonah's Gourd Vine’,” which had 632 and 338 downloads respectively. The article titled “Self–Respect Restored: The Cultural Mulatto and Postethnic American Drama” by Dr. Lenke Németh, long-time member of the editorial board of HJEAS, had 456 downloads. Over the course of the two years the cooperation lasted, HJEAS itself generated considerable international interest with over six thousand individual downloads.
While the project and its success show the importance of open access scholarly materials, it also highlights the international relevance of HJEAS, also confirmed by the journal’s recent inclusion in the SCOPUS database as the first humanities journal published by the University of Debrecen to achieve this milestone. Congratulations are in order to the authors, the editors, and every colleague involved in the publication process.
