The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association invites submissions for a Fall 2025 issue on the theme of “Health in/of the Humanities.”

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” So reads an inscription on the tomb of the fictional author Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. While darkly serio-comic, the novel’s exploration of how “ideas or the lack of them can cause disease” raises genuine questions about the relationship between the humanities and health that inform the theme of the fall 2025 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic publicly surfaced the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the health sciences, researchers were exploring ties between the humanities and health in interdisciplinary clusters like the medical humanities, health humanities, and narrative medicine. And even earlier—stretching back centuries to humourism and beyond—contacts between the humanities and health sciences provided reliable frameworks for interpretations of individual works, genres, and practices of reading, writing, and speaking that directly impacted the lived, bodily experiences of particular persons and communities.

For the fall 2025 issue of the JMMLA, we invite submissions that contribute new insights into the evolving relationship between health and the humanities, and what this relationship might tell us about the health of the humanities both now and in the future. To this end, we seek submissions that address the following topics:

• Narratives of health, sickness and/or recovery
• Health subcultures
• Disability studies
• Food studies
• Religion and health
• Women’s studies and health
• Medical Humanities, Narrative Medicine, Health Humanities
• Health Science Writing
• Representations of Public, Private, and Global Health
• Environmental Health
• Mental/psychological health
• Psychoanalysis
• Digital Humanities/modeling approaches to health
• Privacy and confidentiality
• Medical technologies
• Health professions/institutions/workplaces

Articles should be between 7,000 and 10,000 words (including notes). Prior to submission please review the JMMLA's Style Guide and Manuscript Manager Instructions. Please direct all questions to the MMLA at mmla@luc.edu or to the editor of this issue, Nathan Jung (najung@wisc.edu).

Submission deadline: September 15th, 2025