Featured Journal Issues

Subversive Comics

an issue of Radical History Review
Paul Buhle, Raymond Tyler Andor, Josh Brown, and Kent Worcester, issue editors

This special issue explores the global history, politics, and cultural impact of radical comics, tracing their evolution from underground comix and early political satire to contemporary graphic narratives and comics journalism. It highlights how artists and scholars have used the medium to challenge power, document social struggles, and expand the boundaries of both art and historical storytelling.

Sylvia Wynter and the Question of Technology

an issue of Social Text
Che Gossett and Tavia Nyong’o, issue editors

This special issue of Social Text emerges from the expanding con- versation across disciplines—philosophy, Black Marxism, critical race theory, aesthetics, feminist critique, and neurophilosophy—that engages Wynter as a source of methodological invention rather than static exegesis. The contributors activate Wynter’s thought to interrogate the entanglements of race, technics, and futurity, building on her call to reconfigure the human as a praxis of planetary coexistence rather than an extractive category of destruction and rule.

Climate Crisis Politics

an issue of Critical Times
Wendy Brown and Timothy Mitchell, issue editors

This double special issue, “Climate Crisis Politics,” is guest-edited by Wendy Brown and Timothy Mitchell. It includes contributions by Brown, Mitchell, Andreas Folkers, Alyssa Battistoni, Julia Dehm, Nayanika Mathur, Heather Davis, and David Bond; a mixed-media, experimental collaboration between Hillary Angelo and Lynne Huffer; and an artistic intervention by Sa’dia Rehman, with a curatorial statement by Al-An deSouza.

Transnational Plant Studies

an issue of Cultural Politics
Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, issue editors

Contributors: Aniket Aga, Fabio Andrés Ávila, Kathleen M. Burns, Juan Pablo Caicedo Torres, Sushmita Chatterjee, Laura Cinti, Sophia Doyle, Susanna Ferguson, Adolfo Jara-Muñoz, Mukesh Kulriya, Miryam Nacimento, Li Qi Peh, Eva Steinberg, Banu Subramaniam

Trans Philosophy

an issue of TSQ
Perry Zurn and Talia Mae Bettcher, issue editors

What do philosophy and trans studies contribute to one another? Trans philosophy is a form of theory accountable to trans lives, histories, and communities. This special issue highlights the substantive and methodological contributions of that nascent field.

Contributors: Rowan Bell, Talia Mae Bettcher, Alex Brostoff, Dan Bustillo, Ciara Cremin, Matthew J. Cull, rl Goldberg, C. Jacob Hale, Ido Katri, Tamsin Kimoto, Resa-Philip Lunau, Blas Radi, Samu/elle Striewski, Sofie Vlaad, Jules Wong, Perry Zurn

Imaginative and Innovative Uses of Law

an issue of Public Culture
Emily Apter, issue editor

Contributors: Arjun Appadurai, Emily Apter, David Birkin, Max Houghton, Lisa Siraganian, Julie Stone Peters, Patricia J. Williams, and Hentyle Yapp 

Through Hartog′s Lens: Regimes of Historicity in French History Books (ca. 1240–ca. 1560)

an issue of Romanic Review
Johannes Junge Ruhland and Antoine Brix, issue editors

Contributors: Antoine Brix, Pierre Courroux, Ellen Delvallée, Jeanette Patterson, Clara de Raigniac, Daniel Reeve, and Johannes Junge Ruhland

For Whom Do We Read?

an issue of differences
Peter Szendy, issue editor

There have been many theories of reading, with their more or less normative claims, that consider the reader on the one hand and the text on the other. What seems to be forgotten, especially since reading has become primarily a silent and solitary activity, is the addressee of reading. This special issue invites literary theorists and historians to engage with a question raised by this reader: For whom do we read?

Hunger Strikes in Comparative Perspective

an issue of South Atlantic Quarterly
Allen Feldman and Özge Serin, issue editors

The first special issue to read comparatively across hunger strikes that mobilize diverse and potentially discordant onto-epistemologies, political genealogies, organizational forms, performative repertoires, and affective intensities. The special issue examines both displacements and connections among resistances to captivity in prisons, colonies, and border regimes — spanning Palestinians in Israeli colonial prisons, indigenous Mapuche in Chile, Tamil insurgents in Sri Lanka, refugees in Greek camps, and Kurdish and communist prisoners in Turkey's F-type high security prisons. Together, the contributions offer a perspective at once site-specific and expansive, critical and generative — one that produces proximity between struggles chronologically and spatially distant, and redefines what constitutes a politics of the body today.

Revisiting US Post-Soviet and Ukrainian Immigrant Narratives After Russia’s Invasions of Ukraine

an issue of Twentieth-Century Literature
Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Katharina Wiedlack, issue editors

Contributors: Anastassiya Andrianova, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Daria Semenova, Saltanat Shoshanova, and Katharina Wiedlack

Modernizing Federal Drug Sentencing

an issue of Federal Sentencing Reporter
Alison Siegler, issue editor

This special two-part issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter captures the momentum sparked by the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s 2024 national roundtable on federal drug sentencing reform. Building on that dialogue, part one brings together leading judges, scholars, and practitioners to critically assess whether and how the federal drug guidelines should be modernized. Contributors explore pressing questions such as the continued reliance on drug quantity, alternative measures of culpability, fentanyl sentencing in the context of the opioid epidemic, and reforms to mandatory minimums and safety valve eligibility. Timely, substantive, and policy-shaping, this collection is essential reading for anyone invested in the future of federal sentencing reform.

Incarceration: Exploring the Contours of the Carceral Archipelago

an issue of French Historical Studies
Sophie Fuggle and Briony Nelson, issue editors

This special issue uncovers histories of incarceration in France and the French empire from the early modern period through the late twentieth century. Its articles examine both coerced and non‑coerced forms of confinement, including prisons, penal colonies, and monastic institutions. The issue illuminates the shifting priorities of governing authorities as well as the concrete practices of enclosure. It also invites reflection on the legacies of these policies and experiences, especially in light of the contemporary context of high imprisonment rates in France and its overseas territories.

Plays for Asian America

an issue of Theater
Christine Mok, issue editor

"Plays for Asian America" is a special issue of contemporary playwriting that spotlights three recent works by Asian American playwrights. Mia Chung’s Catch as Catch Can, Kimber Lee’s different words for the same thing, and reid tang’s Isabel unsettle and reforge how Asian America is imagined today. The issue includes a contextualizing introduction and interviews with the playwrights and artists who premiered the works.

The Rest is Political: Radical History of Repose

an issue of Radical History Review
Amy Chazkel and Anup Grewal, issue editors

This issue of Radical History Review explores the radical potential for the historical study of sleep and rest while it considers how people and communities make history at times of repose, inspired by the contemporary urgency of ensuring the right to restorative time away from labor. In a range of research articles and essays that highlight research spanning the globe, contributing authors explore how rest and sleep have been fundamental and contested features of political, economic, and cultural systems and imaginaries, social movements, and activist interventions.

In/Capacitations of Tradition

an issue of History of the Present
Basit Kareem Iqbal and Milad Odabaei, issue editors

Scholars and activists often invoke scientific, religious, and cultural traditions as a resource to respond to contemporary forms of violence and destruction. This special issue instead problematizes the taken-for-granted capacity of tradition. It investigates the incapacitations of tradition as part of the history of destruction and the ensuing limits of translation and transmission.

Pedagogy in the Age of AI

an issue of Pedagogy
Barclay Barrios and Wendy Hinshaw, issue editors

This is the first in a double issue examining how generative AI is reshaping English studies and composition pedagogy, not as a passing technological trend but as a paradigm shift that challenges core concepts such as authorship, originality, ethics, and literacy. This first issue, The AI Turn, brings together classroom-based research and reflective pedagogical essays, foregrounding humanistic values—process, reflection, equity, and ethical judgment—while charting critical, creative, and deliberately varied responses to AI in writing instruction. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how educators are engaging AI thoughtfully without surrendering disciplinary commitments or pedagogical purpose.

Beyond the Secular: Rethinking the Religious Question in Chinese Literary Modernity

an issue of Prism
Lei Ying and Hang Tu, issue editors

This special issue reflects on the entanglement of revolution, enlightenment, and the “religious question” throughout modern Chinese literary history. On the one hand, we pay critical attention to religion as a living force in propelling Chinese writers and intellectuals as they wrestled with the monstrous realities of a modern world. On the other hand, we examine the contested rise of secular ideals that competed for the sacredness previously reserved for religious traditions. Together, the individual cases demonstrate the fluid boundaries between the sacred and the profane as well as the imbrication of the articulation of the category of “religion/zongjiao” and the transformation of the practice of “literature/wen 文” in China’s long twentieth century.

Appréhender l’Autre: Altérités coloniales dans la littérature française du XVIIe au XIXe siècle

an issue of Romanic Review
Pierino Gallo and Pascale Pellerin, issue editor

This issue offers a multifaceted perspective on the confrontation between Europeans and so-called savages, colonists and colonized peoples (Africans, Orientals, Native Americans, etc.), and aims to broaden a little-explored perspective to include all representations of the Other exploited by French writers, particularly in their fiction, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. A focus on the study of colonial otherness as it is understood, modified and shaped by literary genres allows the authors of this issue to examine not only the theme of exoticism, but also the phenomena of slavery and oppression, as well as the notions of fanaticism and tolerance.res allows the authors of this issue to examine not only the theme of exoticism, but also the phenomena of slavery and oppression, as well as the notions of fanaticism and tolerance.