Series Editorial Collective
Hosam Aboul-Ela is Professor of English and AAEF/Burhan and Misako Ajouz Professor of Arab Studies at the University of Houston. His commitments in his work include anti-imperialism, global inequality, and radical humanism. He is the translator most recently of Sonallah Ibrahim’s epic novel of international solidarity, Warda. His most recent book of criticism is Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens. For Seagull Books, he curates the Arab list and co-edits with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak the Elsewhere Texts series.
Cynthia Franklin teaches contemporary literature and cultural theory in the English Department at the University of Hawai‘i, and coedits Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies. She has coedited special issues of Biography including “Life in Occupied Palestine” and “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing.” For the past ten years, Cynthia has been on the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and a founding member and faculty advisor of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH).
Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies and the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. Her writing and teaching focuses on eighteenth-century North America and the histories of gender and sexuality in the context of statecraft, as well as queer and trans history and politics. She is the author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (2018) and the editor of two volumes of essays and three journal special issues.
Louis Mendoza, School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, Arizona State University. His research focuses on Chicanx-Latinx Literary and Cultural studies with emphasis on U.S. immigration literature, prison literature, and oral histories. In 2012, the University of Texas Press published A Journey Around Our America: A Memoir on Cycling, Immigration, and the Latinoization of the U.S., and Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the U.S. His most recent book, (Re)Constructing Memory, Place, and Identity in 20th Century Houston: A Memoir on Family and Being Mexican American in Space City U.S.A is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Fall 2023.
S. Shankar (editorial collective convener) is a novelist, literary and cultural critic, and translator. He is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, and a member of the Board of External Experts for the Nobel Prize for Literature (2022–2025). His research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, creative writing, critical caste studies, and humanities approaches to poverty annihilation. Shankar’s most recent book is his third novel Ghost in the Tamarind, and his most recent critical book is the award-winning Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is a feminist scholar of cultural practice, social imagination, and global political economy, and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009); Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004); and most recently, Remaindered Life (2022), an extended meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire. She is founding director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, an independent community library, cultural space, and publishing house in San Fernando, La Union.
Essays in the Critical Humanities (EtCH) is committed to publishing work by activists and intellectuals that will form incisive and collective radical futures in which humans and non-humans not only survive but thrive. Learning from critiques of sexual and gender violence, colonialism and capitalism, caste and race, and more, the series provides ways to think the history of the present with an intentionality that includes the global. EtCH publications bring the power of scholarly research and theoretical reasoning to social justice goals, and they ignite challenging study in and beyond the classrooms of the neoliberal university, wherever it may be. EtCH therefore functions outside the university press publishing ecosystem and maintains editorial independence as it facilitates work that is sometimes at cross purposes with institutional structures. At the same time, it recognizes the value and preserves features of academic scholarship, such as peer review and an orientation to the pedagogical power of the classroom in amplifying important ideas.
EtCH recognizes the limitations of both the journal article and the monograph. Where the former is often too short to make a sustained intervention in a debate of urgent political import, the latter just as often can be superfluous to making many arguments of substance. Hence, EtCH essays are intended to be anywhere from 40-100 pages—a length that allows for rigor and depth while also enabling full engagement in one or two readings and assignment in the classroom. Within this format, EtCH makes room for a variety of genres and sub-genres of the sharply thought, from and across the accessible, the experimental, the theoretical, and the vernacular.
EtCH works will be published in the first instance as print and e-book but open as well to other formats.
EtCH welcomes proposals and inquiries. Please write to EtCH@np-press.org. Proposals should be 500 words and include comments on proposed audience. Also include a 250-word bio.