This special issue will highlight new work in queer ecology that engages and extends concepts of queer time developed by theorists such as Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, José Muñoz, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Carolyn Dinshaw, and others.

This is a CFP seeking panelists for the 2027 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. We invite papers that examine racialization and ethnicization across Sinophone and Asian contexts in which local projects of improvement and rule are entangled with colonial and imperial systems and epistemologies, both Western and non-Western, external and internal, often sustained by local elites and intermediaries. We understand these contexts in broad terms, including transnational, diasporic, and colonial aspects. Processes of racialization and ethnicization, as well as resistance to and negotiation of such processes, could involve, but are not limited to, discussions of care, gender, and sexuality.

How is everyone doing?

At a routine meeting of the Editorial Board of this journal in March 2026, this innocuous question erupted into disquiet, tension, unease. Speaking from vastly different parts of the world, there was an unmistakable sense of a planet slipping beyond available comprehension and unplugging us from work and life routines. As wars in the Middle East expand and fires spread from apartment blocks reduced to rubble to bombed oil refineries and shipping corridors, profound geopolitical, personal, even psychic rifts leave us grasping for the language and feel of the moment, the falling apart of things, the zeitgeist of an endangered now.

Cuteness is a twenty-first-century sensation—from the global expansion of Sanrio fandom to the rise of social capital around Labubu and Jellycat, from K-Pop stars (real or animated) to cute animals like the quokka and Fennec fox. This issue explores a “cuteness turn” found in many public realms around the world. The adoration of attractive or cheerful objects associated with childishness and youthfulness is part of the human experience. However, this issue does not examine cuteness as a transcultural aesthetic or psychological condition, but we focus on its larger political implications. Throughout history and around the world, this “universal” sentiment has often been manipulated for commercial and ideological purposes.

The Robert Lowell Society invites papers on the musical engagements of Confessional and late-Confessional poets with a view to sponsoring a panel at the ALA Symposium "Music and the American Literary Imagination" (January 28-30, 2027, Nashville, TN). Such papers could include inquiries into: 

• The musical forms of Confessional poets' verse—e.g., Sylvia Plath’s stark meters and her refrains, or John Berryman’s jazz-like syncopation, or Adrienne Rich’s and Frank Bidart’s use of musical metaphors and structures;

Historically, researching and teaching the different art forms took place in a well-sealed vacuum: for example, using literary theory to decipher one of the great texts, visual and compositional analysis to examine a sublime painting, or montage splicing to perceive the nuances of film. However, it is becoming more difficult to recognize the borders that separate cinema, literature, and the visual arts. Factors including the rise of globalized societies and the emergence of new technology have forced us to reconsider medium specificity and our relationship with creative expressions and works of art.