Editors’ Introduction

Dear Readers,

As of 2023, the Hong Kierkegaard Library’s Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter had been in existence for over 40 years. Now, in December 2024, we are bringing the publication to a new platform as an open-access, peer-reviewed journal, making its contents available to students and scholars through libraries, databases, and other online resources, and reshaping it in terms of content, depth, and reach. Among other things, we have introduced the new title International Journal of Kierkegaard Research (IJKR). We are pleased to present here the theme and scope of this transformed publication.

A specialist journal has everything to do with the paradox of community. Our challenge is to “upbuild” what is there, the current field of study—supporting, nurturing, inspiring, and promoting—but to do so without drawing boundaries around it that exclude the surprising, the challenging, the different, and the critical. The IJKR seeks to publish research that opens Kierkegaard’s texts anew for our “present age.”

Kierkegaard conjured the single individual of modernity by appealing to his singular reader, and his impact on our empirical world would be difficult to overstate. To become a reader, for Kierkegaard, is to be changed by the text: goaded—as by a Socratic gadfly—to a more earnest responsibility. The IJKR aims to facilitate the back and forth of original text and scholarly response, of conversation and exchange, and of the sharing that happens between scholarship and the demands of “actuality.” It hosts a virtual space in which writing on Kierkegaard questions and invigorates our experience, and in turn, tests and inspires what happens today.

With its roots in the Hong Kierkegaard Library, which supports students and scholars from around the world in coming together and accessing resources for reading Kierkegaard, the IJKR aims to provide a platform for the fruits of this research. Then, following the Editors’ own connections with both the Hong Kierkegaard Library in Minnesota and the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen, we hope to foster further dialogue between two traditional centers of research (the one Anglo-American-leaning, the other European-leaning), as well as to stimulate cross-readership between existing circles of scholarship.

Outstanding essays should be available to others to read, and the IJKR aims to support scholars producing excellent work in a way that is indexed and recognized by the broader academic community. This is the goal of the Journal: to strengthen the field of Kierkegaard studies, from undergraduate to doctoral students through established and already-esteemed scholars, in such a way that “strengthening” might also mean opening and broadening.

In this spirit we solicit rigorous and imaginative essays from scholars in diverse fields, including philosophy, religious studies, psychology, politics, literature, and from those scholars working at the intersection of disciplines on subjects inspired by Kierkegaard’s texts.

The first issue of the International Journal of Kierkegaard Research includes eight pieces distributed over four sections: four peer-reviewed articles, one student article, an invited contribution, and two book reviews. It is available to anyone both through Manifold, an open-source platform for scholarly publishing, as well as through downloadable PDFs. Please see the “Notes on Contributors” for more information on the contributors to this issue.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Manifold, and in particular, St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota for taking on this “instance” of Manifold for our new publication. We are especially grateful to Ben Gottfried with Rølvaag Memorial Library, St. Olaf College, for his kind efforts in helping us navigate this online platform, and to our student employee Kiara Fitzpatrick for her research and learned expertise in bringing the website to fruition. We would also like to thank our peer reviewers for their time and hard work, both in guaranteeing the quality of our publications and in offering feedback that helps enhance the research of our community of scholars. Likewise, we are grateful to the members of our advisory board for their support, to Brian Söderquist of St. Olaf College for his willingness to brainstorm during the inception stage, to the editors of the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook for their collaborative spirit, to our Managing Editor, Dawna Hendricks, for her excellent organizational skills and professional oversight, and to Colleen O'Reilly for her meticulous copyedit. Finally, we thank our readers and contributors for their openness and support. We look forward to continuing to build community and scholarship together around the work of Kierkegaard in the times to come.

Sincerely,
The Editors

Elizabeth Xiao-An Li, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen
Frances Maughan-Brown, Philosophy Department, College of the Holy Cross
Anna Louise Strelis Söderquist, The Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College