Featured Journal Issues

The Rest is Political: Radical History of Repose

an issue of Radical History Review
Amy Chazkel and Anup Grewal, issue editors

This issue of Radical History Review explores the radical potential for the historical study of sleep and rest while it considers how people and communities make history at times of repose, inspired by the contemporary urgency of ensuring the right to restorative time away from labor. In a range of research articles and essays that highlight research spanning the globe, contributing authors explore how rest and sleep have been fundamental and contested features of political, economic, and cultural systems and imaginaries, social movements, and activist interventions.

Trans Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century Americas

an issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
Jesse Alemán, Ren Heintz, and Bernadine Marie Hernández, issue editors

This special issue navigates the messy terrain of doing historical work around gender nonconformity before such gender defining terms existed. By bringing the nineteenth-century Americas into critical conversation with Trans Studies, the issue addresses questions of the periodization of trans history, the politics of naming and gendered language, trans and its relationship to identity, as well as trans embodiment and racialization. In turn, by orienting trans studies toward the early Americas, the volume pressures the relatively modern analytical limits of trans studies and opens new opportunities for trans studies scholarship to address the complexity of layered colonialities, the biopolitics of slavery, and the intersections of transnational intimacies.

In/Capacitations of Tradition

an issue of History of the Present
Basit Kareem Iqbal and Milad Odabaei, issue editors

Scholars and activists often invoke scientific, religious, and cultural traditions as a resource to respond to contemporary forms of violence and destruction. This special issue instead problematizes the taken-for-granted capacity of tradition. It investigates the incapacitations of tradition as part of the history of destruction and the ensuing limits of translation and transmission.

Pedagogy in the Age of AI

an issue of Pedagogy
Barclay Barrios and Wendy Hinshaw, issue editors

This is the first in a double issue examining how generative AI is reshaping English studies and composition pedagogy, not as a passing technological trend but as a paradigm shift that challenges core concepts such as authorship, originality, ethics, and literacy. This first issue, The AI Turn, brings together classroom-based research and reflective pedagogical essays, foregrounding humanistic values—process, reflection, equity, and ethical judgment—while charting critical, creative, and deliberately varied responses to AI in writing instruction. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how educators are engaging AI thoughtfully without surrendering disciplinary commitments or pedagogical purpose.

Beyond the Secular: Rethinking the Religious Question in Chinese Literary Modernity

an issue of Prism
Lei Ying and Hang Tu, issue editors

This special issue reflects on the entanglement of revolution, enlightenment, and the “religious question” throughout modern Chinese literary history. On the one hand, we pay critical attention to religion as a living force in propelling Chinese writers and intellectuals as they wrestled with the monstrous realities of a modern world. On the other hand, we examine the contested rise of secular ideals that competed for the sacredness previously reserved for religious traditions. Together, the individual cases demonstrate the fluid boundaries between the sacred and the profane as well as the imbrication of the articulation of the category of “religion/zongjiao” and the transformation of the practice of “literature/wen 文” in China’s long twentieth century.

Appréhender l’Autre: Altérités coloniales dans la littérature française du XVIIe au XIXe siècle

an issue of Romanic Review
Pierino Gallo and Pascale Pellerin, issue editor

This issue offers a multifaceted perspective on the confrontation between Europeans and so-called savages, colonists and colonized peoples (Africans, Orientals, Native Americans, etc.), and aims to broaden a little-explored perspective to include all representations of the Other exploited by French writers, particularly in their fiction, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. A focus on the study of colonial otherness as it is understood, modified and shaped by literary genres allows the authors of this issue to examine not only the theme of exoticism, but also the phenomena of slavery and oppression, as well as the notions of fanaticism and tolerance.res allows the authors of this issue to examine not only the theme of exoticism, but also the phenomena of slavery and oppression, as well as the notions of fanaticism and tolerance.

Literary Attention: From the Twentieth-Century to the Present

an issue of Poetics Today
Yael Levin, issue editor

Untimely Time: On History's Instrumental Narratives

an issue of English Language Notes
Samuel Boyd, issue editor

A Web of Sentiments: Gender and Letter Writing in the Early Modern World

an issue of Modern Language Quarterly
Jose Maria Perez Fernandez and Ida Caiazza, issue editors

Bandung’s Cultural Afterlives

an issue of boundary 2
Hala Halim and Ziad Dallal, issue editors

The past year marked the seventieth anniversary of the Asian-African Conference, more commonly known as the Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia from April 18 to 24, 1955. At this historic gathering, representatives of twenty-nine recently decolonized states convened to articulate a shared project of cultural and political solidarity. The Cultural Afterlives of Bandung assembles critical essays that expand our understanding of this project and its enduring significance for political and cultural solidarity among the peoples of the Third World.

German Memory Politics at a Crossroads

an issue of New German Critique
Jonathan Catlin, Andreas Huyssen, and Anson Rabinbach, issue editors

This special issue of New German Critique explores major changes in German memory politics in the context of globalization and wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Incipient and Established Dialect Differentiation and Segmentation in North American English

the supplement to volume 100 of American Speech
Thomas Purnell, issue editor

Dialects, like brands, are built on the concepts of differentiation and segmentation. When dialectologists think of these concepts in language variation and dialectology, they recognize that not all variation in the linguistic signal (spoken, written, signed) produces perceptual differentiation or segmentation. Papers in this volume reflect established variation across groups, while other variation described in this volume are novel and serve to establish a baseline or examine ongoing variation that could lead to change. Such change leads us to look at older dialect forms and refer to the early latency as incipience.

Public Health Under Siege

an issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law
Sarah E. Gollust and Jonathan Oberlander, issue editors

Articles in this special issue explore the many ways in which public health policy has been transformed and dismantled during the second Trump administration, including the consequences of budget cuts, eroded administrative capacity and reduced workforce, erased data and lost research, the abandonment of health equity, and the shifting position of global public health. Authors also make sense of the political currents such as anti-expertise attitudes that have reshaped public health's policy environment. Finally, they look ahead to ways in which public health can recover, reinvigorate, and surmount the turmoil that now envelops it.

Theorizing Racial Capitalism in (Post)Imperial Europe

an issue of SAQ
Sarah Bufkin and Ida Danewid, issue editors

For all that Cedric Robinson first deployed the concept of “racial capitalism” to describe the racialist hierarchies that early modern Europe entrenched and exported to the rest of the world, much of the scholarly literature on racial capitalism has centered North American histories of colonization, Indigenous dispossession, racial slavery, and indentured labor. More recently, scholars have begun to explore how theories of colonial and racial capitalism might be transplanted to and critically revised for other postcolonial conjunctures. This issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly joins that generative conversation by asking how we might theorize racial capitalism for the heart of empire.

Queer Apocalypse

an issue of GLQ
Curran Nault, Justin L. Mann, and Samantha Pinto, issue editors

Queer Apocalypse explores the subcultural limits and pleasures of creating queer art, scholarship, and community across hostile terrains and turbulent times. This issue’s imaginative and engaged mix of approaches to the apocalyptic includes conversations, brief essays, and full-length articles–all of which reflect and mobilize the embodied stakes of queer studies today. Spanning disciplines, geographies, and temporalities, Queer Apocalypse surveys strategies for living trans, crip, and queer lives within ongoing structures of violence and crisis, offering not just critique, but radical possibilities.

Writing History in Place

an issue of Agricultural History
Andrew C. Baker and William Thomas Okie, issue editors

The interpretive introduction and accompanying articles in this special issue explore the uses of place as a concept, method, and narrative tool in agricultural, environmental, and rural history. The wide-ranging essays demonstrate how an attention to place can lead historians to highlight the human scale, the inhabited, the particular, and the contingent. The issue provides readers with interpretive models and suggestive examples of the value of place in framing historical thinking, research, and writing.

Marine Worlds of the Long Eighteenth Century: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth-Century Life

an issue of Eighteenth-Century Life
Killian Quigley, Kate Fullagar, and Kristie Flannery, issue editors

Theaters of Post-Truth

an issue of Theater
Lily Climenhaga, issue editor

Contributors: Julian Blaue, Luanda Casella, Chokri Ben Chikha, Gibson Alessandro Cima, Lily Climenhaga, Ameera Conrad, Yves Degryse, Daria Kerschenbaum, Stefani Kuo 郭佳怡, Kfir Lapid-Mashall, Cuixi Lin, Sawako Nakayasu, Edy Poppy, Georgia Petersen, Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Kenneth T. Williams, Alex Wilson