Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2025

Coordinators: Christina Gerhardt (Univ. of Hawai‘i, Mānoa) and Cajetan Iheka (Yale Univ.)

In tandem with the growing climate crisis, the environmental humanities has expanded to engage an increasing array of languages and literatures, as well as theories and methodologies in literary criticism. Graduate and undergraduate programs focusing on the environmental humanities have also been established at universities across the world to underscore the importance of humanistic values and interdisciplinary scholarship in tackling the planetary crisis. The exponential growth of the environmental humanities has transformed disciplinary practices, recalibrating the category of the human amid the unequal distribution of climatic privileges and risks and foregrounding relational processes across species and on spatial and temporal scales. Taken together, the fields represented by the environmental humanities are best understood in practice. In practice, the literary field is a prominent space of intellection in the environmental humanities for its formal flexibility, imaginative possibilities, and representational capacities, especially as it concerns understudied voices and perspectives. Consequently, this special issue of PMLA asks, What is the affordance of literature for the environmental humanities as practiced in various cultural contexts? What constellations of practices in the environmental humanities emerge from its incubation as a scholarly, theoretical, and critical paradigm, specifically through the politics of literary representation and literature’s salience for both pedagogical and activist projects? What literary modes, including experimental ones such as speculative climate fiction, have provided key points of intervention for the practice of the environmental humanities?

This special topic welcomes essays that address any language area or literary period and that assess the past, present, and future directions of the environmental humanities in practice. We seek essays from a wide range of vantage points and methodologies that articulate understandings of the environmental humanities that are accessible and of interest to the broad PMLA readership. Analyses of specific literary texts should emphasize the implications for the environmental humanities. We are particularly interested in submissions considering the environmental humanities as practiced beyond North America and Europe and in submissions on issues and conceptual frameworks arising from the Global South, especially those that examine the relationship between the environmental humanities and the imperative of decolonization across a variety of contexts. We also welcome submissions on the environmental humanities in relation to the following topics, among others: animal studies, Black ecologies, climate fiction, digital humanities, disability studies, ecopoetry, environmental justice, horror, Indigenous studies, petrocultures and petrofiction, plant studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, speculative climate fiction, and trans studies. This list is intended as a suggestion not a restriction. The eras, languages, literatures, methodologies, and topics are open.

Submissions should follow PMLA's author instructions guidelines.