Categories | Literary magazine |
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Founder | Jeffrey Kittay |
First issue | 1990 |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Lingua Franca was an American magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia.
The magazine was founded in 1990 by Jeffrey Kittay, an editor and Professor of French Literature at Yale University. Kittay, as the New York Times reported, "saw a niche for vivid reporting about the academic world and especially about its many personal feuds and intellectual controversies." Kittay told the newspaper, "I was an academic who was very, very hungry for information about what made my profession so alive, where people became passionate about abstract ideas." The New York Observer described the magazine's impact, "It soon became a much-talked-about phenomenon inside and outside academia"; as the Village Voice expressed it in November, 2000, on the journal's tenth anniversary, "Lingua Franca's influence on nineties magazine culture has been so strong, it's sometimes hard to remember that it was unique in academia when it began."
Contributors included editors and writers who went on to careers at The New Republic, Time, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker: Peter Beinart, Lev Grossman, Fred Kaplan, Robert S. Boynton, Warren St. John, Jonathan Mahler, Jennifer Schuessler. As cultural critic Ron Rosenbaum wrote in The New York Observer, "The kind of writing about ideas that once found a home at Lingua Franca has since — with the assistance of many talented Lingua Franca alumni, both writers and editors — succeeded in changing the face of serious journalism for the better."