After nearly a decade of dormancy, a group of graduate students from FIU’s Department of History at the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs has brought new life to the department’s student research journal, now reborn in a digital format.
Building on a departmental legacy, the team revived The Atlantic Millennium, first established by FIU History graduate students in the 1990s. When the editorial team began their work, they had only seen a few printed copies of the old journal – the most recent, from 2015. Seizing the opportunity, the students set out not only to resurrect the publication but also to gain firsthand experience in academic publishing from managing submissions and peer reviews to offering editorial feedback. The relaunch marks the journal’s first digital edition, under its new title, The Millennium, published through FIU’s Digital Commons, and represents a new era of student scholarship and collaboration.
The inaugural digital issue features a variety of content, including five research articles and three video interviews with FIU history graduates. One of the alumni is a professor at another university, another is in a leadership role at the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and the third serves as a public historian at a veterans’ institution.
The 2023–2025 Millennium staff included Giovanna Violi (Editor-in-Chief, Ph.D. candidate, FIU) and Bo Rodgers (Editor-in-Chief, M.A. graduate, FIU and Ph.D. student, University of Miami), with an editorial board composed of FIU doctoral candidates Noel Hernandez, Maria Zyla, and Melina Haberl.
The revival began when Associate Professor of History, Gwyn Davies, who had preserved a few print copies of The Atlantic Millennium, asked Violi, then vice president of the Department of History Graduate Student Association (DOHGSA), if the organization wanted them for its archives. That conversation sparked an idea.
Violi pitched to fellow students and Department faculty the idea to revive the journal. Under the mentorship of Professor Wood, who served as faculty advisor, a graduate student editorial team spent nearly two years building the journal from the ground up.
A particular point of pride for Violi is that she and her colleagues expanded submission types beyond long-form research articles to non-traditional formats. The inaugural issue contains, for example, not only “traditional research papers,” but also boasts a blog post on research experience and an essay on creating a digital humanities project.
"Our aim was to highlight the creativity of our students in formulating new and exciting projects and to speak to the lived experiences of doing research,” Violi says. “This is the center of the mission: we are a journal by students for students so we tried to address conversations that are not present in traditional journals.”
With the help of Green Library staff and the Digital Commons team, the students successfully launched The Millennium online last summer.
The journal welcomed submissions from all graduate students in the department of history, or undergraduates enrolled in senior seminars. The first issue showcased a wide range of historical topics from cultural and transnational studies to political and social histories. With many submissions, five articles were published in the debut edition.
Looking ahead, the editorial team plans to open submissions to graduate students beyond FIU,, including graduate students from other universities who attend the annual DOHGSA conference. The next Call for Papers for the 2027 issue will be announced soon.
Read the full first issue of The Millennium on FIU Digital Commons: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/millennium/