Call for Contributions

The Post-Pandemic University: Storying Possibilities (under contract with Routledge)

Co-editors
Alysia Kolentsis (University of Waterloo, St. Jerome’s)
Katherine R. Larson (University of Toronto)

Overview
The Post-Pandemic University brings together a variety of perspectives on the challenges, lessons, and emergent paths laid bare by the pandemic and its aftermath and the role that literature and literary studies might play in shaping the post-pandemic context. The volume is designed to shift traditional academic models by including a combination of reflective and critical writings, along with the possibility of creative and artistic works.

In taking this approach, we are interested in reflecting the whole self as integral to learning, scholarship, leadership, and creative practice, and being open at the levels of both content and structure to the vulnerability and playful experimentation that invites. While as co-editors we bring our experience as scholars of early modern English literature to this project, we are interested in pushing beyond that historical and geographical context, as well as our own positionalities, to think in interconnected and intentionally uncolonizing ways — not only about
literature, story, and literary studies, but about the spaces, structures, and approaches that might shape universities into the future, drawing on learnings from COVID-19.

The collection will examine experiences of the pandemic and possibilities stemming from the COVID-19 era through the lens of literary studies, which we understand broadly to encompass the study and creation of story across historical, global, institutional, and community contexts. With its foundational focus on narrativizing and meaning-making, and its attention to the various ways we create, share, and reify stories, literary studies offers particularly apt models for this type of exploration. The volume will also be distinguished by its interest in reflecting the imagining of societal and structural change in its structure and format, through the interweaving of critical, reflective, and creative contributions.

Guiding Questions
● What have we learned? What is worth preserving? Insights from pandemic experiences
● How can academic structures be shifted? Possibilities for hope and change; grappling
with the myths and realities of institutional intransigence and inertia
● What does it mean to be more than a “mind” in university contexts? Bringing the whole
self, including embodied and lived experience, to the post-pandemic university

● How do we process loss? The role of grief and mourning in shaping a reimagined future
● What does an ethics of care look like in the post-pandemic university?
● Lessons from and possibilities for leadership
● Examples of pandemic / post-pandemic critical pedagogy in action
● Stories as a way of imagining differently and shifting paradigms
● The ways that literature / literary studies supports and enacts re-visioning

We are open to submission formats that might include creative or artistic works as well as contributions that combine reflection with critical analysis. Critical essays should be a maximum of 5,000 words, including notes and works cited. Reflective and creative pieces will depend on the format, and submissions may also combine formats and approaches. We are also committed to welcoming contributions from voices that do not typically appear in academic collections, including university staff and students, as well as experts bringing community-based knowledges or working in fields adjacent to academia who are also grappling with fundamental shifts in the wake of the pandemic. Once published, the volume will be open access.

Provisional Timeline

February 2025: contributors confirmed
October 2025: contributors submit work to co-editors
Late Fall/early Winter 2025-26: submissions to be edited and revised if needed
Spring 2026: final volume to be submitted to Routledge

Expressions of Interest will be considered until January 30, 2025. As we are shaping the volume, we are particularly interested in receiving proposals for creative or artistic contributions. If you have any trouble accessing the online fillable form link or have any additional questions, please contact the editors directly at amkolentsis@uwaterloo.ca and katie.larson@utoronto.ca.