CfP: Seeking Asian Studies Scholars for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Transecology2026.8.30 {en}

A decade after Nicole Seymour’s chapter “Trans Ecology and the Transgender Road Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, following Susan Stryker’s foreword to the 2020 book Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature, and after TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly’s November 2024 issue on trans* ecologies, which built on the Queer and Trans* Ecologies (QTE) Interdisciplinary Initiative symposium that drew more than six hundred participants, transecology as a field needs a comprehensive reference handbook. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Transecology will be the first such volume: covering 38 topics, organized across four sections moving outward in scale from the molecular body to the deep-time planet. See the full list of topics with descriptions at the end of this CFP.

Members of H-Asia may be especially interested in Topic 15: Non-Anglophone and Global South Transecologies and Topic 35: Transecology and Science Fiction: Alien Life, Posthuman Biology, and Ecological Imagination beyond Earth. Broadly speaking, Asian studies spans dozens of distinct national and linguistic traditions, and its non-Anglophone ecofeminist scholarship, for example, from South and Southeast Asian contexts, is one part of a much wider comparative field this topic opens onto. Japanese science fiction’s tokusatsu and mecha traditions, and Chinese science fiction’s recent global visibility through writers like Liu Cixin, represent two large, distinct speculative traditions this topic’s scope was built to include.

All 38 topics with descriptions are listed at the end of this CFP.

Trans embodiment reorganizes our sense of time and scale — through hormonal transition time, community time, and geological time — and this clustering is reflected in the Handbook itself. To preview the Handbook’s overarching structure, a short Foundations section comes first, gathering topics that examine transecology’s own genealogy and disciplinary boundaries. Chapters in this section stand outside any single scale — they are about the field’s history and self-definition, not about a body, a community, or a planet. The three-part structure of the rest of the Handbook then begins. Part I opens at the molecular and individual scale: chemistry, sensation, the single body. Part III closes at the planetary and deep-time scale: the atmosphere, the ocean, the epoch. Part II is the connective tissue between them: community, region, law, and culture, the scale at which intimate experience becomes shared knowledge and shared knowledge becomes political. By spanning scales ranging from the body to the planet, with the mediating communal scale between these extremes, the Handbook emphasizes that transecology’s center of gravity is not the isolated body or the abstract planet, but the connecting community.

The senior editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Transecology, Douglas Vakoch, has edited over two dozen books, including Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature (2020), Transgender India: Understanding Third Gender Identities and Experiences (2022), and The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature (with Sabine Sharp, 2024). Vakoch also serves as the general editor of four book series in environmental studies and transgender studies for Bloomsbury Academic: Ecocritical Theory and Practice, Environment and Society, Critical Plant Studies, and the recently launched Trans Studies.

Submitting Your Proposal and Timetable

Interested authors should submit a 300-word abstract, a 200-word biography, 5 key scholarly references, and a sample of a previously published chapter or article to https://bit.ly/Handbook_of_Transecology no later than November 15, 2026. Proposals submitted by email will not be accepted. Abstracts, biographies, and scholarly references should be combined into a single Word document, and previously published chapters or articles should be submitted as PDFs. Both Word files and PDFs should contain the author’s name in the file names. Please include your email address in your Word document so we can contact you with our decision about your proposal.

Your abstract should clearly state which of the Handbook’s 38 topics is most relevant to your chapter, listing both topic number and name (see full list below).

All chapters must have specifically transgender and ecological dimensions, and not merely a more broadly queer focus.

In addition to the Handbook, we will also be creating standalone books on topics for which we receive an especially strong response of outstanding proposals. Your proposal will automatically be considered for both the Handbook and standalone volumes.

You are welcome to submit more than one abstract. If you decide to submit multiple abstracts for different chapters, please add a note at the top of each abstract to indicate whether you wish to be considered for writing only a single chapter, or whether you wish to be considered for writing more than one chapter.

The most competitive proposals will detail the author’s argument. It is not enough to describe what you plan to do in your chapter. You should summarize what you will conclude.

Authors will be notified whether their proposals are accepted by December 15, 2026. Partial first drafts are due by March 1, 2027; solid first drafts of full chapters are due by May 1, 2027; and final versions that cross-reference other chapters extensively are due July 15, 2027. All authors must have completed a PhD. In your 200-word biography, please note the year and university where you earned your doctorate. Only previously unpublished works will be considered.

Further information at https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20159883/cfp-seeking-asian-studies-scholars-bloomsbury-handbook-transecology.

Source: CFP: Seeking Asian Studies Scholars for The Bloomsbury Handbook of Transecology, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online „CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.“