A new academic journal dedicated to The Beatles has been launched.
Published by Liverpool University Press, the Journal of Beatles Studies promises to be “the place for critical study, debate and discourse about The Beatles”.
In the introduction to the first edition, academics Holly Tessler and Paul Long argue that the recent success of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary and McCartney’s headlining of Glastonbury underline how The Beatles remain a “musical and cultural phenomenon” more than 50 years after their break-up.
“Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, cultural and scholarly fascination with the Beatles has not diminished but flourished over time,” they state.
To date, Beatles scholars have “been working in comparative isolation, compelled to publish their findings for non-Beatles specialists and audiences,” they added, however.
“This is a scholarly gap that the Journal of Beatles Studies seeks to redress. At its most elemental, the Journal of Beatles Studies will be a place, the place, for critical study, debate and discourse about the Beatles,” the two academics went on.
Published in November 2022, the free, bi-annual journal’s first edition had a theme of ‘navigating and narrating the Beatles: establishing a research agenda for the twenty first century”.
