How to Be a Global Humanist begins with the tension built into its title. The humanities, as an academic field, emerged through Western histories of learning and the institutions that made those histories legible as scholarship. Yet the practices gathered under that name exceed that narrow genealogy. Across the world, people have made meaning from language and image. They have preserved the past, taught inherited forms of wisdom, and argued over what human life is for. Such work does not need the construct of “the humanities” to authorize it. The better question is what the category reveals about the traditions it encounters, and what it renders difficult to see. This volume thus asks how humanistic inquiry can be approached globally without allowing the familiar language of the humanities to flatten the intellectual worlds it seeks to understand.
This volume seeks proposals from scholars working in disciplines traditionally understood as humanistic. It aims to probe the promise and difficulty of calling the humanities global. Essays may address any aspect of the question, from the theoretical—what does the category of the humanities make possible? what does it distort? how have different intellectual traditions understood humanistic inquiry?—to the practical—where is humanistic work done, and under what conditions? how do language, access, and institutional form shape what becomes visible as humanistic inquiry? how can humanists build more globally inclusive forms of teaching, publication, translation, and scholarly exchange? Essays may take a historical or contemporary perspective; comparativist approaches are especially welcome when they put pressure on the category of the humanities itself.
Essays should be approximately 4,500 words. Please send proposals of 200–300 words, along with a brief bio, to the volume editors at editors Hayley Cotter (hcotter@umass.edu) and Tracey Miller-Tomlinson (tomlin@nmsu.edu) by September 30, 2026. Contributors will be notified of decisions by October 31, 2026. Accepted contributions will be due by March 31, 2027.
Hayley Cotter
