Special Issues

Humanities publishes Special Issues to create collections of papers on specific topics, with the aim of building a community of authors and readers to discuss the latest research and develop new ideas and research directions. Special Issues are led by Guest Editors, who are experts on the topic and all Special Issue submissions follow MDPI's standard editorial process. The journal’s Editor-in-Chief and/or designated Editorial Board Member will oversee Guest Editor appointments and Special Issue proposals, checking their content for relevance and ensuring the suitability of the material for the journal. The papers published in a Special Issue will be collected and displayed on a dedicated page of the journal’s website. Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies and Guest Editor responsibilities can be found here. For any inquiries related to a Special Issue, please contact the Editorial Office.

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Labor Utopias and Dystopias
edited by Ping Zhu
submission deadline 15 Jan 2026 | 3 articles | Viewed by 7807
Keywords: utopia and dystopia; global capitalism; posthuman labor; environment; gender
Italian Studies Today: Global Perspectives
edited by Mara Santi and Guylian Nemegeer
submission deadline 26 Jan 2026 | Viewed by 580 | Submission Open
Keywords: global Italian studies; evolving Italian cultural identity; teaching Italian culture; academic history of Italian studies
Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing
edited by Paul Fagan
submission deadline 30 Jan 2026 | Viewed by 1350 | Submission Open
Keywords: queer theory; singles studies; celibacy; 19th and 20th century Ireland  ; Irish women’ s movements and literature; feminist politics
Aqueous Instabilities
edited by Camille Mathieu and
submission deadline 28 Feb 2026 | Viewed by 1119 | Submission Open
Keywords: mississippi river valley basin; art; history; literature; culture; indigenous studies; african-american studies; colonialism in early america; early modern; contemporary
Modern Greek Literature and PTSD
edited by
submission deadline 28 Feb 2026 | Viewed by 411 | Submission Open
Keywords: modern Greek literature; trauma; dictatorship
New Geographies of Thought: Black and Indigenous Epistemologies and Literary Production in Spanish America
edited by M'bare N'Gom
submission deadline 28 Feb 2026 | Viewed by 241 | Submission Open
Keywords: Afro-Latin American studies; decolonial thought; indigenous epistemologies
Literature and Sound
edited by and Luca Bacchini
submission deadline 31 Mar 2026 | 2 articles | Viewed by 2796 | Submission Open
Keywords: listening; aurality; ethnography of literacy; phonology; music; modernity
Media, Cultural Memory and Hauntology
edited by and Robert Edgar
submission deadline 30 Apr 2026 | Viewed by 666 | Submission Open
Keywords: cultural memory; hauntology; spectrality; nostalgia; simulacrum; trauma; revisionism; postmodernism; habitus; identity and place; canon formation; retrofuturism; memoir; retro-revivals; reboots and remakes; documentary; the biopic
Irish Literature and Culture
edited by Robert Brazeau
submission deadline 30 Apr 2026 | Viewed by 145 | Submission Open
Keywords: contemporary Irish studies; interdisciplinary methodologies; cultural formations; critical paradigms; twenty-first-century Ireland
Innovative, Imaginative, and Inventive: Adventures and Adventurers in Victorian and Edwardian Transportation
edited by Joellen Masters
submission deadline 1 May 2026 | Viewed by 272 | Submission Open
Keywords: travel innovation and innovators; invention and inventors; literary genre; the railway; aeronautics; intrepid women; victorian and fin-de-siè cle recreation; transport press; domestic tourism; cosmopolitanism; yachting and tourism; the motorcar; fin-de-siè cle celebrity tourists
Representations of the Body in Early Modern Spanish Art, Science, and Literature
edited by
submission deadline 15 May 2026 | Viewed by 507 | Submission Open
Keywords: nudity in art and literature; the senses and sensory perception; political allegories of the body (i.e.; the body politic); the body of Christ; the Eucharist; and transubstantiation; control (or lack of control) of the female body; physical monstrosities and physical ugliness or abjection; non-normative bodies in early modernity; beauty canons; bodily alterations (cosmetics; clothing; etc.) or transformation (disguise/transvestism and its effects on gender)
Writing in the Backlash submission deadline 31 May 2026 | Viewed by 372 | Submission Open
Keywords: women’ s writing; feminist literary production; literary representations
Fairy Tales: Visions and Revisions
edited by
submission deadline 31 May 2026 | Viewed by 351 | Submission Open
Keywords: fairy tale; myth; revision; children's literature; feminist revision
Swiss Literature and Culture
edited by
submission deadline 1 Jun 2026 | Viewed by 790 | Submission Open
Keywords: Swiss literature and culture; literary multilingualism; Swissness
Literature and Health in the 21st Century
edited by and Anita Wohlmann
submission deadline 1 Jun 2026 | Viewed by 608 | Submission Open
Keywords: literature; medical humanities; health humanities; narrative medicine
Film and Philosophy
edited by Corin Depper
submission deadline 1 Jun 2026 | Viewed by 327 | Submission Open
Keywords: film-philosophy; Deleuze; phenomenology; eco-philosophy; speculative realism; experimental film
Horror Genres in Modern Fiction
edited by Rebecca Janicker
submission deadline 30 Jun 2026 | Viewed by 331 | Submission Open
Keywords: culture; ghosts; Gothic; haunting; horror; media
Imagine Otherwise: 21st Century Multiethnic Speculative Fiction and Narrative Time submission deadline 30 Jun 2026 | Viewed by 200 | Submission Open
Keywords: speculative fiction; temporalities; futurity; history; contemporary literature; Africana; Latinx; indigenous; AAPI; multiethnic writers
Baroque Tragedy: Intersections of Literature and Cinema
edited by
submission deadline 1 Jul 2026 | Viewed by 231 | Submission Open
Keywords: Baroque tragedy; cinema; literature; illusion
Dynamics of Romani Literature: From Testimonials and Autobiography to Autofiction and Autosociobiograpy
edited by
submission deadline 6 Jul 2026 | Viewed by 69 | Submission Open
Keywords: agency; autobiography; autofiction; autosociobiograpy; diaspora; discrimination; engaged literature; minority; racism; self-empowerment; self-representation; subalternity; testimonial; world literature
Telling Tomorrows: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture
edited by Carla Kungl
submission deadline 31 Jul 2026 | Viewed by 208 | Submission Open
Keywords: detective fiction; popular culture; adaptations; crime fiction
Shakespeare, Gender and Religion
edited by
submission deadline 31 Jul 2026 | Viewed by 205 | Submission Open
Keywords: Shakespeare; gender; religion
Emotion and Medieval Literature
edited by Elizabeth Elliott and Kate Ash-Irisarri
submission deadline 1 Aug 2026 | Viewed by 275 | Submission Open
Keywords: later middle ages; literary texts; emotions; medieval textual production
(This special issue belongs to the Section Literature in the Humanities)
Black Feminist Ecologies
edited by Stefanie K. Dunning
submission deadline 31 Aug 2026 | Viewed by 514 | Submission Open
Keywords: Black women’ s nature writing; nature and environmental discourse; discourse on abolition; marronage; the Plantationocene; the Anthropocene; and Black; trans; and queer ecologies
Crossing Oceans of Time and Space in Transpacific Asian American Literature submission deadline 31 Aug 2026 | Viewed by 252 | Submission Open
Keywords: Asian American literature; Pacific Islander; young adult literature
How Has the Outer World Engaged Chinese Literature and Culture?
edited by Robert Kibler
submission deadline 1 Sep 2026 | Viewed by 340 | Submission Open
Keywords: Chinese influence; global literature; art; music; philosophy; culture
Space Between: Landscape, Mindscape, Architecture
edited by Ramona Fotiade and Andrea Sartori
submission deadline 30 Sep 2026 | 4 articles | Viewed by 5677 | Submission Open
Keywords: avant-garde or post-modernist literary and artistic practices; performance and visual arts; spiritual and philosophical conceptions and emerging cross-cultural phenomena
Cross-Fertilizations: European Literature and Hollywood Cinema (and Vice Versa) submission deadline 30 Sep 2026 | Viewed by 304 | Submission Open
Keywords: European literature; Hollywood cinema; cross-fertilization
Sports, Literature and Culture submission deadline 30 Sep 2026 | Viewed by 193 | Submission Open
Keywords: sport; athlete; star; fandom; spectatorship; nationalism; the body; performance; gender; Germany; athletic aesthetics; transnational sporting identities
Literary Modernism and the Concept of Freedom
edited by Tim Clarke
submission deadline 30 Sep 2026 | Viewed by 191 | Submission Open
Keywords: literary modernism; modernity; philosophy; ethics; aesthetics; freedom
Emotions and Affect in Words and Music
edited by
submission deadline 30 Sep 2026 | Viewed by 184 | Submission Open
Keywords: intermediality; liminality; music; emotions; affect
New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry: Unsettling the Literary Tradition
edited by Elizabeth A Petrino
submission deadline 30 Sep 2026 | Viewed by 116 | Submission Open
Keywords: nineteenth-century American women’ s poetry; women’ s writing; materialist approaches; historical poetics; formalism; gender; literary tradition and canon formation; social activism; feminism
New Approaches to Biblical Literary Studies
edited by
submission deadline 30 Sep 2026 | Viewed by 109 | Submission Open
Keywords: Bible; literature; Jewish and Christian scriptures; Jewish– Christian relations; theories of interpretation/hermeneutics; midrash; Biblical allusion; Tanak; old and new testaments
Reading the City: Urban Infrastructure in Literature
edited by Jie Lu
submission deadline 30 Sep 2026 | Viewed by 107 | Submission Open
Keywords: literary studies; infrastructure; urban modernity
Modern Fantasy Writing submission deadline 1 Oct 2026 | Viewed by 348 | Submission Open
Keywords: fantasy; speculative; medievalism; fairyland; quest; alternative history; the other; fable; secondary world
The State of LGBTQ Fiction
edited by
submission deadline 31 Oct 2026 | Viewed by 101 | Submission Open
Keywords: LGBTQ studies; LGBTQ fiction; gay and lesbian fiction; queer theory; queer representation
Realism in Chinese Literature: From Classical Roots to Contemporary Expressions
edited by and Yan Lu
submission deadline 15 Nov 2026 | Viewed by 257 | Submission Open
Keywords: realism; naturalism; socialist realism; magical realism; neo-realism; Chinese literature; sinophone literature
“We the People”: Telling the Story of the US 250th in Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Myth
edited by Abigail Heiniger, Christine A. Jones, James Deutsch and Liang Luo
submission deadline 1 Dec 2026 | Viewed by 807 | Submission Open
Keywords: fairy tales; folklore; mythology; coloniality; national; and transnational identities
American Poetry and Poetics in the World
edited by
submission deadline 31 Dec 2026 | Viewed by 115 | Submission Open
Keywords: American poetry; geocriticism; public humanities; scholarship of teaching and learning; translation studies; world literature
Very Cool! The Literature, Arts, and Culture of Antarctica
edited by Ellen Frye
submission deadline 31 Dec 2026 | Viewed by 13 | Submission Open
Keywords: Antarctica; polar; literature; arts; ice; environment; climate change
Comedy and Platonic Interpretation
edited by Sonja Tanner
submission deadline 28 Feb 2027 | Viewed by 89 | Submission Open
Keywords: Platonic dialogues; philosophy and comedy; Socrates and Aristophanes; literary interpretation  ; ancient humor
(This special issue belongs to the Section Philosophy and Classics in the Humanities)
Receptions of Women in Ancient Greek Literature
edited by
submission deadline 31 Mar 2027 | Viewed by 845 | Submission Open
Keywords: women in ancient Greek literature; ancient gender studies; women in classics
Rewilding the Humanities
edited by Thomas Nolden
submission deadline 1 Sep 2027 | Viewed by 195 | Submission Open
Keywords: ecocriticism; anthropocene; nature in literature; eco-aesthetics; ecofiction; posthumanism; cultural ecology; literary biology; ecofeminism; postcolonial ecocriticism; blue humanities; energy humanities; environmental humanities
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