Spring 2025

Taste and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France

Guest Editors, Patrick Bray and Alessandra Aloisi

We seek articles that explore how taste relates to aesthetic and political debates around democracy throughout nineteenth-century France. Articles (in English or French) will look at taste from a variety of perspectives and explore its different meanings, whether aesthetic, political or culinary.

In press

Summer 2025

Monique Wittig: Sex, Literature and Politics

Guest Editors, William M. Burton, Ilana Eloit, and Benoît Loiseau

Over two decades after her death, this special issue of L’Esprit Créateur examines the enduring legacy of the lesbian feminist writer and theorist Monique Wittig. It offers a transatlantic, intergenerational, and intersectional exploration of Wittig’s literary, theoretical, and political output, and seeks to contextualize the oscillations in interest surrounding Wittig’s work while appraising contemporary reception within and beyond academia.

In press

Fall 2025

Reading the First Nations of Quebec: Indigenous Creativity and Critical Contexts

Guest Editors, Martin Munro and Miléna Santoro

While the study of Native American and Anglophone Canadian First-Nations literature is well established, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the work of First Nation authors from Quebec writing in French, and it rarely features in discussions of Francophone postcolonial writing more broadly. This volume seeks to expand awareness, understanding, and appreciation of this important, albeit relatively new corpus of writing in French. Proposals by January 3, 2025, to mmunro@fsu.edu and milena.santoro@georgetown.edu.

Winter 2025

Future Worlds of Health

Guest Editors, Benjamin Dalton, Benjamin Gagnon-Chainey, and Kaliana Ung

This special issue explores the potential of speculative methodologies within the Medical Humanities to imagine the futures of health/care. To do so, it activates collaborative, interdisciplinary and intersectional explorations of health/care futures as they are imagined, expressed, and designed through literature, arts, philosophy, architecture, and medicine in French and Francophone cultures. In a time of pandemics, widening healthcare inequalities, the emergence of AI, and the question of the environmental sustainability of healthcare, this special issue demonstrates how speculative imaginaries across diverse disciplines – from science fiction to design fiction – can drive the research needed to approach and tackle these key challenges.

Please send abstracts (in English or French) of 250-300 words plus a short bio to the Guest Editors Benjamin Dalton (b.dalton@lancaster.ac.uk), Benjamin Gagnon-Chainey (benjamin.gagnon-chainey@umontreal.ca) and Kaliane Ung (khu3@pitt.edu) by March 31, 2025.