Call for Submissions to The Scholarly Letter
Call for Submissions:
Scholarship in the Age of the On-lightenment
Deadline: August 2nd | Honorarium: $150
We are living in what we have named the age of the On-lightenment.
Much of the popular discourse of our time insists that the internet has eroded intellectual life: we scroll ourselves into doom and rot, sell our attention to the market, and grow cognitively diminished by the day. We are told that life online stands in opposition to the Enlightenment. Yet this view becomes tenuous when we consider how long-form essays circulate through newsletters, graduate students explain theory on TikTok, scholars host public conversations on podcasts, independent thinkers assemble digital salons, and entire syllabi circulate through threads. A certain kind of intellectual life now unfolds through feeds, notifications, and recommendation systems that surface and rank ideas according to logics of engagement and visibility.
If infrastructures shape epistemic practice – as they did in the eighteenth century – then it makes little sense to cling to ideas of enlightenment developed under materially distinct conditions without reckoning with how those conditions have changed.
In The On-lightenment, we name this condition of inhabiting a refracted light – a persistent glow pouring from our screens and feeds through which the world now reaches us. On-lightenment describes the experience of sensing that we know things in a light shaped by the structural conditions of our chronically online lives.
Seen in this light, intellectual life has not disappeared; far from it, it has migrated, adapted, and reassembled. But within this transformed infrastructure, what it means to be enlightened has shifted. We inhabit an age of ambient and mimetic critique, platform reason, epistemic restlessness, and the continuously updating informational self.
If the On-lightenment is the condition in which we now think, learn, and know, then scholarship – both as practice and as identity – cannot pretend to stand outside the glow of our intellectual life online.
It is in this spirit that we invite essays reflecting on scholarship in our On-lightened world.
Questions & Themes
We are inviting personal non-fiction essays that examine scholarship under the conditions of the On-lightenment.
We are not seeking think-pieces about “the decline of academia” nor celebratory tech-optimism in the context of scholarship. Rather, we are seeking reflective, rigorous, intellectually serious essays that grapple with what it means to pursue scholarship and to be a scholar within platformed, curated, and fragmented conditions of illumination.
We are particularly interested in essays that explore questions such as (but not limited to):
How does the self-understanding of who a scholar is change within our contemporary infrastructures of intellectual life?
What does the work of a scholar look like when intellectual life is no longer contained within universities?
How is academic labour reshaped as the material infrastructure of intellectual culture is reorganised?
How do scholar-creators, public intellectuals, and knowledge influencers complicate traditional distinctions between scholarship and content?
What kind of scholarly culture is emerging under the conditions of the On-lightenment?
What does it mean to pursue scholarship seriously in an On-lightened society?
Before Submitting
Read the full seminal essay, The On-lightenment, to understand the conceptual framework of this issue.
Familiarise yourself with The Scholarly Letter – our tone, depth, and intellectual style. This is important as we do not publish conventional academic writing. The best way to understand what we publish is to read it.
Submissions that clearly engage with the conceptual terrain of the On-lightenment and are written in a style consistent with The Scholarly Letter will be prioritised.
Practical Details
Please submit your essay in either .pdf or .docx format, clearly stating your name and including a short bio (100-150 words).
Length: 1500–3000 words
(We are flexible if the intellectual weight of the essay warrants it.)
Deadline: August 2nd, 2026
Submission Email: [email protected]
Subject Line: Submission for The On-lightenment: [Your Title]
If selected, you will be notified by September 6th, 2026.
Submissions must be original, unpublished work not under consideration elsewhere.
Honorarium & Rights
The selected essay will receive a $150 honorarium upon publication.
Authors retain copyright of their work.
By submitting, contributors agree to:
Grant The Scholarly Letter first publication rights
Grant non-exclusive rights for inclusion in future curated collections or book-length anthologies related to this issue (with full attribution)
Full publication terms are available upon request.
A Final Word
To live the On-lightenment is not to stand outside it, diagnosing it from a distance.
It is to linger in its glow – to recognise the refracted light pouring from our screens and feeds – and to ask what kind of intellectual life becomes possible within it.
We look forward to reading your reflections.
If you think someone you know might be interested in contributing, forward this email to them.
As always, thanks for reading🍎
