This peer-reviewed fast-track collection seeks to publish innovative approaches to teaching Aphra Behn’s work, building on existing critical and pedagogical scholarship.

We do invite essays on Behn’s most-taught work, Oroonoko, but we aim particularly to give sustained attention to the full range of her literary life, and are especially interested in proposals about works that have been shown to be amenable to modern undergraduate teaching: the plays, the shorter fiction, the poems.

Aphra Behn is of course brilliant: but, right now, how do we ensure that students meet her, engage with her work, and think critically about what that work tells us about the eighteenth century, women, politics, art, culture, gender, sexuality, colonialism, race, and status? In what interesting or innovative ways can we teach them? What can students learn that many of us are not yet teaching them? What can Behn let students see that that they cannot see elsewhere? In what new contexts, courses, disciplines can her work contribute to critical conversations?

ABO is peer-reviewed, MLA-indexed and open-access, focused on the work of female creatives in the long eighteenth century. It is the journal of the Aphra Behn Society.

Essays in the Concise Collections series are a specific genre: they are

• concise: 3500-4000 words (plus works cited) and scholarly in tone
• focused on effective, insightful, innovative strategies for teaching specific approaches to specific texts, aware of the implications and pedagogies relevant to the specific student audiences they are writing about teaching (introductory, survey, senior lecture, seminar, graduate)
• explicitly informed by current scholarship and critical approaches in their content, but not necessarily original critical scholarship in themselves
• grounded in critical thinking, reflection, and scholarship about teaching and learning

Successful essays in the series make an argument for the importance and originality of their approach and articulate it clearly, while providing specific engagement with the literary text and detail on how critical resources are used and how student learning is engaged and assessed. Innovations in course design, approaches to the texts, classroom activities, and/or student assignment and assessment are highly valued by our readers (narrative descriptions of course syllabi and assignment lists, or directly repurposed lecture notes are not typically effective).

Pluease submit 250-word proposals accompanied by a short biographical statement.

Deadline for proposals: October 31, 2026

Deadline for essay submission: January 30, 2027. (please email editor if you have a brilliant idea but need to discuss timing)

We encourage potential contributors to read a selection from among the more than 40 Concise Collections articles in issues of ABO since 2022: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/