Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature
A Special winter 2027 Issue
"Planetary Precarity"

 Abstract Deadline: November 1, 2026

Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature invites article submissions on the topic of “planetary precarity” for its Winter 2027 issue. This special issue will consider how precarity is produced on both local and global scales. As humans confront our own possible extinction-level threats caused by climate disaster and, supposedly, a future dominated by artificial superintelligence, the organizers seek to investigate how the Victorians reconceived their own precarity in the face of extractive capitalism and ecological crisis. Essays may consider the complicities of Victorian science (including scientific institutions and technologies spawned by scientific breakthroughs), politics, and economics in producing precarity locally and/or globally. Essays could also explore counter-movements that fight to reduce precarity, such as eco-topian communities, trade unions, political parties, agricultural reformers, activist movements, and artists of the period. Authors may choose their preferred lens, from carbon to ecology, from labor to design, from bodies to affect. Overall, the special issue wishes to theorize and historically trace the emergence of the planetary as a politically and ecologically resonant category during the nineteenth century, although essays may also investigate precarity as a historically situated feeling generated by nineteenth-century political trends, scientific findings, and speculative art.

 

Essays should be 7,500-9,500 words, inclusive of notes. The citation style is The Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition), full footnotes and no bibliography. Please submit full essays by November 1, 2026, via Scholastica (https://victorians.scholasticahq.com/for-authors).

Ashley Miller (Albion College) joins Victorians’ editorial team as guest editor for this issue.

Image source: A Private View at the Royal Academy (1883) by William Powell Frith