ecocriticism and environmental studies

Landscapes of Data and DebtDeadline: April 20, 2026Submission Requirements: Please email a 250-word abstract and brief bio-note to powellti@gvsu.edu. What histories, epistemologies, and systems of power shape the social, spatial, and environmental dimensions of financialization and datafication in the globalized present? And what role does literature, art, and storytelling play in representing life—datafied, indebted, and in climate crisis? Exploring debt and data reveals systems of collection and control, as well as ecological harm.

Aims and Scope

Chenkaantal (E-ISSN: 2583-0481) is a pioneer Diamond Open Access Journal for Tamil studies. The journal is dedicated to the academic research of Tamil language, Tamil Literature, Tamil Culture, Tamil Linguistics and other modern trends in Tamil studies.

Call for

In the collective global imaginary, humans seemingly write the world in isolation. We dictate the climate, biodiversity, and natural resources but we also control the ways in which the world is perceived through literature. This roundtable considers how literature is a co-constitutive process written through connectivity across time and space, landscapes, species, environments, and voices by humans and more-than-humans.

JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism—an academic journal published by Michigan State University Press—announces a call for articles and book reviews.JSR seeks articles on political and religious forms of radicalism across the political spectrum. "Radicalism" here refers not to social reform, but to those who seek through violent or non-violent means to bring about sudden political transformation. In particular, we are interested in articles that consider such topics as both historical or contemporary anarchist figures or groups, ecological radicalism, antifa, communism, and radical violence.

Meditations on The Black Garden

Special Issue of African American Review, 2027

Guest-edited by Brandy Underwood (California State University, Northridge); Mia Alafaireet (The University of Texas at Austin); Samantha Pinto (The University of Texas at Austin)

Abstracts due to AARBlackgardensSI@gmail.com by May 1, 2026.

Call for Abstracts:

Rising water levels in oceans and rivers, streams with high flood waves, and torrential rains that turn puddles into lakes: houses that are currently exposed to such increasingly regular water events are becoming a problematic, if not catastrophic, environment. The protective function that the house is supposed to have according to its original idea and design is being compromised. While roofs and walls are supposed to keep out wind and water—and the traditional European gabled roof is primarily designed to divert water from above—in these extreme weather scenarios, basements are flooded, roofs are torn off, entire houses stand like islands in the water or are even swept away.

Special Session Proposal for the 2027 MLA Convention (Los Angeles, 7–10 January 2027).

This MLA 2027 special session, “Unfinished Histories: Literary and Cultural Acts of Hope,” explores radical hope as an emancipatory and dynamic framework for examining how literature, film, and art cultivate creative and relational modes of remembrance. Rather than approaching the past solely through paradigms of loss, grievance, or melancholia, the panel asks how cultural narratives open generative spaces for imagining unfinished futures.

The Spenser Review requests proposals for the upcoming issue 56.3 on the topic of Spenser and the Weather:

While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation with one another remain relatively rare. Too often, Indigenous texts are incorporated into comparative, world, or global literary frameworks without meaningful engagement with Indigenous studies scholarship, or are read primarily through the organizing categories of nation, region, empire, or postcoloniality. This seminar seeks to create a space for comparative Indigenous literary inquiry that centers Indigenous texts, epistemologies, and methods on their own terms.

This seminar is interested in non-anthropocentric or even anti-anthropocentric understandings of gender-sexuality arrived at through transdisciplinary conversations between feminist theory, queer studies, the philosophy of biology, multispecies ethnography and environmental humanities. It posits that such understandings can emerge as accurate and effective translation practices across the material-semiotic continuum of multispecies worldmaking. In addition, it argues for aesthetic and affective valuations of multispecies desires, intimacies and sociosexual infrastructures.

CFP: IRCL Special Issue on Energy Perspectives on Children’s and YA Literature  

Have you ever paused to consider the energy infrastructure supporting the adventures of Anne in Lucy Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908)? As an avid walker, Anne probably has a relatively low carbon footprint. Over a century later, in Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean (2017), struggles over energy development has become a central literary topic, underscoring the message of the UN Secretary General António Guterres, who at COP 30 urged that “The fossil fuel age is ending. Clean energy is rising. Let us make the transition fair, fast, and final" (United Nations, 2025).   

American Literature Association

May 26-29, 2027

Boston, MA

Roundtable on James Finley’s Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism

The Thoreau Society seeks papers for a roundtable on James Finley’s recently released Abolition and the Rise of US Environmentalism: The Literature and Politics of Free Soil (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). Papers may respond to or extend Finley’s book in part or in whole, and may include topics such as:

-Abolition and environmentalism

-The Free-Soil movement

-Settler colonization and abolition

-Racial capitalism 

-Abolition then and now

Environmental racism predates its own name. The term entered public discourse in 1982, but the conditions behind it, namely exposure to hazard and unequal claim to safety, go back to slavery itself. Historian Carl Zimring traces this to a basic split in American thought: white meant clean, Black meant dirty. That split decided who did the dirtiest, most dangerous work, and who lived closest to pollution, for generations. In 1968, Memphis sanitation workers went on strike over exactly that: unsafe, degrading labour shaped by the same racial split. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while there in support of the very strike. That split still operates today.

The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.