Sanctum Sanctimonious

About Us

The Haunted Playground is an experiment in scholarly freedom. This is a refuge for the ideas that haunt you. The ones that refuse to sit quietly in the back of your mind – the ones where getting them onto the page is less an act of scholarship and more an act of exorcism. We believe in freedom from metrics, from regulations, from committees, and from group think. This is a place where academic thought can still be encouraged to be playful and transgressive.

We are a small, eccentric, ragtag collective. We are designers and writers and architects and poets and pirates and plunderers. We’re privateers of publishing. We believe that intellectual life needs room to breathe, and for the joyful communion with ghosts. Ghosts of the past, ghosts of the present, and the ghosts of unrealised futures.

We founded the Haunted Playground for a simple reason. There must be places in academia where whimsy is still welcomed.

We are not a department, or a university initiative. We are an entry on nobody’s CV. We are a coterie, compelled to create. You don’t have to join up. You’re already home.

What We Do

We publish the Haunted Playground Epigrams – a series of psychic screams with no set expectation of style, length or content. All we ask is that your work be rigorous, playful, and that you hold yourself to the intellectual standard that you’d expect from an ancient scholarly tradition. We reject the metric-obsessed mania of the neo-liberal university. We embrace imagination and speculation. We encourage conceptual mischief and peripheral explorations. We aim to misbehave.

We welcome unclassifiable work, interdisciplinary work, and liminal work. We value clarity over jargon. We encourage reflection and generosity of thought. We believe in the art and craft of academic labour, not merely its outputs.

The best way to get a feel for what we’re looking for is to read the epigrams we’ve already published. We’re not looking for sloppy work or rejected detritus. We’re not looking for work that merely failed to find a home, but rather that for which no other home currently even exists.

The Editorial Bored

Editor-in-Chief: Professor (emeritus) Bartleby (pictured)

Associate Editors: Professor (emeritus) B. the Univited; Sir Simon de Canterville; Dr. Jacob Marley; Dr. Bloody Mary; Professor (emeritus) Alexa Grady; Professor (emeritus) Alexie Grady.

Probationary Assistant Editors (third class): Dr. Michael Heron.