The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association invites submissions for a Fall 2026 issue on the theme of “The Humanities is Where Hope Lives."

As the country generally and the academy specifically head into an uncertain future, hope can be found in the Humanities. This assertion may seem especially quixotic considering both capitalist and cultural pressure in the United States to privilege the “usefulness” of any object, phenomena, or even person that is measurable in some kind of way. The effects of this utilitarianism on higher education have been manifold, such as reducing college degrees to passports to the working world and the vocations therein.

Nowhere in the academy has this strain of American culture been so deeply felt as in Humanities programs. Whether it be learning a different language, appreciating a piece of literature, or studying other cultures, unless these pursuits can be monetized in some sort of way, they are curios at best and inconsequential at worst. When practitioners of these disciplines are driven to demonstrate how the Humanities impart skills transferable to economic endeavors, they become disconnected from the inherent worth of what they study and teach. The result is an either/or false dichotomy; the Humanities disciplines offer both extrinsic and intrinsic significance, and there is hope.

The root word for this expansive field of Humanities is “human,” and it is in real human connection that hope for our future is fostered, sharing our common humanity as expressed through the written word, languages, and the literary arts. The Humanities not only communicate what we were, what we are, and what we could be, but we also get to the heart of the “why,” of how meaning is made, and, in doing so, we forge human bonds. These give us the hope of a shared future in all its splendid, multi-faceted variety. In our current political climate, the consequence of the Humanities cannot be overstated; the Humanities is, after all, where hope lives.

For the fall 2026 issue of JMMLA, we invite submissions that contribute new insights into the value of the Humanities in relation to a more hopeful future. To this end, we seek submissions that address the following topics:

• The future of the Humanities

• The politics of studying languages, or literature, or library studies

• The digital Humanities

• Pedagogy in the time of the politics of chaos

• Film studies and the future of the Humanities

• The possible, future definitions of “library"

• Linguistics: past, present, and future

• The efficacy of the modern composition class

• Writing studies

• Storytelling, both inside and outside of the Humanities

• The current status and future of film in the academy

• Intrinsic vs. extrinsic value of any branch of the Humanities

• Utilitarianism and its discontents in a specific field of study

• The war on gender studies

• Representations of the Humanities outside of the academy

• Humanities graduates

• The future of Humanities faculty

• Humanities and politics.

Please direct all questions to MMLA at [email protected] or to the editor of this issue, Joe Keener ([email protected]).

Submission deadline: September 15th, 2026.

Guest Editor: Shu Wan, University at Buffalo ([email protected])

The advancement of artificial intelligence has transformed humanities research and education, deepening computation’s influence on scholarly practice and everyday life. From the early era of “humanities computing” in the 1970s to the rise of “computational humanities” over the past decade, this trajectory highlights the enduring—and expanding—role of computation in shaping inquiry across the humanities. These intersections are especially visible in interdisciplinary work. As T. S. Eliot observes, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The same spirit can illuminate how methods and tools migrate across fields. “Corpus studies,” for example, emerged in linguistics but now informs scholarship in language and literary studies worldwide. Moreover, Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” inspired Lauren Tilton’s “distant viewing” in historical research. Such transfers underscore the dynamic interplay among humanistic disciplines, and the transformative potential of computation as it moves between language and literary studies and other humanistic fields.

This special issue of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association invites scholarly articles, critical essays, and book reviews that examine how interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration shape the transfer of computational methods between language and literary studies and the wider humanities. We welcome contributions that engage the complex relationships between technology and humanities, including (but not limited to) the following questions:

Histories of Computational Transfer across the language and literary studies and other humanistic fields: How has the movement of computational tools and techniques reshaped the studies of language and literature? What can language and literary scholars learn from experiences of adopting computational approaches—especially the failed attempts? What do these “failures” reveal about the limits of computational work in the humanities?

Computational Technology and Interdisciplinary Methodologies: Which emerging or established methods should be translated to or from language and literary studies? How can such transfers open new directions for research, pedagogy, interpretation, and collaboration in literary and language scholarship?

Ethical Challenges of Transfer and Interdisciplinary Studies: How can we mitigate misuse or overreach when computational technologies enter language and literary studies? What critical frameworks are needed to ensure responsible adoption of technology in humanities?

Please direct all questions to MMLA at [email protected] or to the editor of this issue, Shu Wan ([email protected])

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2027