A London School of Economics academic has accused a prestigious history journal of prioritising “identity politics” over intellectual quality, claiming he was told that a proposed special issue would not go ahead unless it featured a female contributor.
In a resignation letter to the Journal of Global History’s editorial board, Gagandeep Sood, an associate professor of international history at the LSE, said he was quitting as a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press (CUP) title because he was given a “make-or-break” ultimatum to include at least one female author in a planned collection of essays.
While he would make efforts to find a suitable female contributor, Dr Sood explained that the project concerned “an incipient subfield of global history…currently populated by a very small number of scholars who are very largely male”, so this might not be possible. By making the inclusion of a female author an “a priori condition”, the journal was indicating that it was “open to compromising intellectual quality and intellectual fit in favour of considerations of identity politics”, he continued.
