Image used with permission from the artist: Kristen Haas Curtis

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Public Humanities is a new international open-access, cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of humanities scholarship and public life. The journal invites proposals for themed issues that pose urgent questions on contemporary public issues that require rigorous and relevant humanities knowledge.

The journal invites submissions for the upcoming themed issue Creating the Medieval Now, which will be guest edited by Eleanor Barraclough and Laura Varnam. 

The deadline for submissions is 1 May 2026.

Description  

This special issue investigates the dynamic crossroads of medieval scholarship and contemporary creative practice, presenting auto-ethnographic and creative-critical reflections from medievalists who are also practicing artists— poets, writers, musicians, visual artists, storytellers, and zinesters— to bring fresh, imaginative, and embodied perspectives to the study of the medieval past.

We invite contributions from medieval scholars who are engaging in creative practice not as outreach or supplement but as a core mode of their scholarly inquiry into the Global Middle Ages. Rather than focusing on how the Middle Ages are used in popular culture— as in much traditional work in medievalism— this collection turns inward, towards the creative outputs of trained medievalists themselves, to ask: 

• How do artistic processes inform and reshape scholarly research?
• What resources does creative practice offer to mainstream/traditional scholarship?
• How might scholarship itself become a creative artform?

 This issue is interested in topics including: creative re-imaginings of medieval voices through poetry, fiction, and performance; the use of autoethnography, memoir, and trauma-informed methods; feminist, queer, and intersectional engagements; the public-facing power of creative dissemination via radio, zines, podcasts.

Contributions should include examples of and reflections upon the contributor’s creative work to show how ‘making with’ the Middle Ages creates new possibilities for the forms and modes of academic criticism, and offers the potential for new, recreative methodologies that are transferable beyond the individual practitioner’s skillset. 

We are actively seeking submissions from early career researchers and from Global South and non-white contributors, across disciplines, especially those who are engaging with Islamic, Byzantine, African, and East Asian medieval worlds. In addition to essays reflecting on past and ongoing projects, the issue may also feature new creative-critical pairings: original artistic pieces published alongside scholarly reflections.

All submissions should be written in accessible language for audiences within and beyond the academy.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities. Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style. Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal. 

All submissions should be made through the Public Humanities online peer review system. Authors should consult the journal’s Author Instructions prior to submission. 

All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission. See the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information.  

Contacts

Laura Varnam (laura.varnam@univ.ox.ac.uk) and Eleanor Barraclough (e.barraclough@bathspa.ac.uk)

Questions regarding peer review can be sent to the Public Humanities inbox at publichumanities@cambridge.org.