DEADLINE EXTENDED ONLY FOR ACADEMIC ARTICLES AND BOOK REVIEWS

Over the past two decades, Blue Humanities has emerged as one of the most dynamic and generative areas within the environmental and cultural humanities, foregrounding the ocean and water as critical sites of knowledge, imagination, and politics. Early scholarship such as Steve Mentz’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009) and Shipwreck Modernity (2015) positioned the sea as a space where ecological crisis, literary imagination, and cultural memory converge. More recently, works like Hester Blum’s The View from the Masthead (2008), Stacy Alaimo’s explorations of trans-corporeality in Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016), and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) have expanded the field, establishing the ocean as a space not only of ecological and material reality but also of philosophical depth, postcolonial critique, and affective resonance.

The rising significance of the Blue Humanities is visible in the proliferation of research clusters, edited volumes, and symposia dedicated to oceans and watery ecologies. Volumes like Blue Humanities Reader (ed. Mentz, 2021) and Oceanic New York (ed. Mentz, 2015) serve as foundational primers, while recent collections such as Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures (2023) demonstrate the interdisciplinarity of the field, drawing on literature, cultural studies, anthropology, STS, and political ecology. In tandem, postcolonial and Indigenous scholarship (e.g., Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Our Sea of Islands, Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots) has foregrounded how oceans and archipelagic worlds challenge land-based paradigms of history, culture, and ecology.

This special issue of The Apollonian seeks to act both as a primer for readers new to the Blue Humanities and as a platform for advancing future directions in the field. Contributors are invited to consider the oceans, rivers, and waterbodies as an archive, a medium, a stage of ecological devastation, and a horizon for cultural and political imaginaries. Essays may take the form of critical overviews of specific strands of oceanic thought, close readings of texts, films, and other cultural media, or explorations of methodological innovations at the intersection of the Blue Humanities and other disciplines.

By drawing together contributions from literature, history, philosophy, cultural geography, political ecology, Indigenous studies, and beyond, the issue will underscore the urgency of the oceanic turn in the humanities, especially at a time when rising seas, acidification, and extractive capitalism are reshaping not only planetary ecosystems but also human futures.

Submissions may include but are not limited to:

• Theoretical foundations and futures of the Blue Humanities.
• Oceans, rivers, and waterbodies as archives of memory, trauma, and history.
• Shipwreck, ruin, and salvage as literary and cultural tropes.
• Postcolonial and Indigenous oceanic epistemologies (e.g., “our sea of islands”).
• Oceans, rivers, and waterbodies in climate change discourse and Anthropocene studies.
• Maritime labour, migration, and histories of displacement.
• Transoceanic imaginaries in literature, film, and visual arts.
• The politics of deep-sea mining, marine extraction, and blue economies.
• Intersections of the Blue Humanities with Ecofeminism, STS, and Posthuman theory.
• The affective registers of water: immersion, drowning, fluidity, buoyancy.
• Oceans, rivers, and waterbodies in speculative fiction, video games, and popular culture.
• Blue Humanities and pedagogy: teaching waterbodies in the humanities classroom.

The Apollonian: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies seeks submissions for its third issue (since its revival). The journal welcomes Academic Essays (within 5000 words), Short Essays (within 1500 words), Translations (within 3000 words), Book Reviews (within 2000 words), as well as Photo Essays, Poetry, Short Stories, Interviews, and Personal Essays submissions. For the forthcoming issue, the submissions can be interdisciplinary, but must fall within the broader definition of humanities (and this also includes areas such as STEM and medical humanities, new media, visual cultures etc). We are currently publishing once a year.

We do not ask for any Article Processing Charges (APC) or any other form of fee for publication. Selection of articles or other pieces will be based entirely on peer review.

Book Review:

Reviews of books not older than two years are invited (so, for this Call for Papers, no older than 2023). We may consider submissions of book reviews on fiction, non-fiction, academic volumes (monographs/edited volumes/anthologies), or poetry volumes provided they are written by our stylistic requirements. The book review should be no longer than 2000 words. 

We follow MLA 9th Edition guidelines for citations. Font to be used is Times New Roman, size 12, spaced at 1.2 pt, and only unlinked endnotes (no footnotes). The submission must be done by email. We only accept Word Files (.doc or .docx). Submissions should be prepared for blind peer review (cover page containing abstract, keywords, and bio with no identifiers from the second page onwards). Submissions should only be adjudged if all submission criteria are fulfilled successfully. We regret to inform you that minor edits cannot be accommodated once an issue has been published. Only in the case of major errors may you contact our editors via email.

For enquiries and submissions please e-mail: apollonianjournal@gmail.com

Our Website: https://theapollonian.in/

Instagram: @apollonian_journal