Emotions and Affect in Words and Music

Dear Colleagues,

This open access Special Issue of Humanities will explore the intricate interplay between affect and emotions as expressed through words and music, highlighting their profound impact on human experience and communication. Emotions shape both linguistic and musical forms, serving as fundamental vehicles for meaning-making, social connection, and personal expression. By examining the affective responses elicited by verbal and musical stimuli, contributors should investigate how emotions are conveyed, perceived, and interpreted across a range of cultural and medial contexts. This Special Issue will bring together interdisciplinary perspectives, drawing from literary studies and linguistics, musicology, psychology, neuroscience, and digital humanities, to unravel the mechanisms underlying emotional expression and reception.

Topics for this Special Issue may include but are not limited to the following:

• Theories on emotions and affect within intermediality;
• Musicological aspects of musical affectivity;
• Reader response and phenomenology 2.0;
• Historical theories/examples of emotions and affectivity and how they speak to the here and now and vice versa;
• Affect theories in words and music by Spinoza, Deleuze/Guattari, Massumi, Ngai, and beyond;
• Neurological entry points in words and music;
• Intermedial “atmospheres” and similar liminal phenomena;
• Media in shifting affect/emotion ecologies;
• Affect and emotions in the age of artificial intelligence. 

While the language of the journal is English, contributions are invited from all disciplines and literary languages!

Deadline for Abstracts: 31 March 2026

Deadline for final Articles: 30 September 2026

Please send strong and referenced 300-word abstracts by March 31st to tgurke@umn.edu.

The final word count should be 6000 to 8000 words, and the Chicago reference style should be used.

Dr. Thomas Gurke
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.