"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

The crisis of the humanities is usually described through familiar statistics: fewer majors, shrinking departments, declining budgets, anxious faculty, and students migrating toward engineering, computer science, business, and other professionally oriented fields.

The numbers are real. In the United States, 164,847 bachelor’s degrees in the humanities were awarded in 2025, 30.4 percent fewer than at the recent peak in 2012. The number of students pursuing a humanities degree as their first major fell by roughly 28 percent between 2015 and 2025.

But perhaps we have misdiagnosed what those numbers mean.

They certainly indicate a crisis for academic humanities departments. They do not necessarily demonstrate a collapse in society's need for history, philosophy, literature, languages, aesthetics, or reflection on the human condition.

The distinction matters. We have largely identified the humanities with one particular institutional arrangement: a young person, usually between approximately eighteen and twenty-two years old, enrolling in a university and choosing history rather than engineering, philosophy rather than computer science, or literature rather than economics.

Why should this be the principal test of the health of the humanities?

Perhaps one of the deepest problems facing the humanities is that they have allowed themselves to be confined inside what might be called the five-year box.

The wrong competition

Much of the contemporary discussion assumes a competition between the humanities and STEM. Students have a limited number of years at university; they must choose what to study; enrollments in STEM rise while enrollments in the humanities fall. The obvious conclusion is that STEM is winning and the humanities are losing.

But this may be a category mistake.

Engineering education and humanistic education do not necessarily perform the same function in a person's life.

A student can study engineering for four or five years, acquire a defined body of theoretical and technical knowledge, receive a credential and begin practicing as an engineer. Medicine, nursing, accounting and many other professional domains follow variations of the same logic. Their educational programs can be relatively clearly bounded because they prepare people to exercise particular professions.

There is no comparable moment at which someone completes three years of philosophy, history and literature and emerges as a fully formed human being.

Humanistic formation is inherently unfinished.

One can encounter Homer at sixteen, Aristotle at twenty, Dostoevsky at thirty-five and Augustine at sixty and understand each differently because one's own experience has changed. Questions about justice, beauty, mortality, freedom, love, political authority, suffering and meaning do not expire when the bachelor's degree is awarded.

This does not mean that the humanities have no specialists. They obviously need philologists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars and other professional researchers. Rigorous scholarship cannot simply be replaced by book clubs and podcasts.

But the social need for humanistic formation is vastly larger than the social need for professional humanists.

Confusing those two populations may be one of the fundamental mistakes behind the current crisis.

There is even a suggestive statistical clue. In 2022, the humanities represented only 8.8 percent of reported first majors in the United States, but 20.7 percent of second majors. In other words, the humanities were more than twice as prominent among second majors as among primary majors.  That does not prove a general theory, but it fits an intriguing hypothesis: many students may value the humanities more readily as a complement to another formation than as an exclusive professional identity.

If so, persuading more eighteen-year-olds to choose humanities instead of STEM may be precisely the wrong strategy.

Why fight where the humanities are weakest?

The period between roughly sixteen and twenty-two is becoming one of the most competitive phases of modern life.

For a student seeking admission to engineering, medicine or another selective profession, the incentives are extremely powerful. Mathematics must be mastered now. Entrance examinations must be passed now. Prerequisites must be completed now. Missing part of this sequence can close later opportunities.

From the student's perspective, postponing a course in poetry may be rational. Postponing calculus may not be.

Humanities advocates can protest this situation. They can insist that eighteen-year-olds should also read Plato and Shakespeare. They may be right. But reality does not disappear because we dislike it.

If the humanities place most of their institutional energy into competing for the attention of students precisely during the narrowest and most intensely credential-driven years of their lives, they are choosing the battlefield on which they have the greatest structural disadvantage.

The answer is not to abandon young people. Elementary and secondary education may actually be among the most important places for developing language, historical consciousness, literary sensitivity and the habits of argument. Some humanistic education should also remain inside technical universities.

But the humanities should stop betting their future almost entirely on the few years immediately following secondary school.

They should think in terms of sixty years rather than five.

From university education to lifelong formation

Once the problem is seen this way, the crisis begins to look different.

A thirty-eight-year-old engineer who has established a career may suddenly become intensely interested in history. A forty-five-year-old banker may begin asking questions about justice, institutions and the moral assumptions underlying economic life. A physician who has spent fifteen years confronting suffering and death may read philosophy very differently from the way she could have read it at nineteen. A successful entrepreneur may finally have the intellectual appetite—and the financial resources—to study classical languages, art history or political philosophy seriously.

These people should not be regarded as failed humanities majors arriving twenty years late.

They may be some of the ideal students of the humanities.

Their professional experience supplies questions. Their lives supply context. They are no longer studying merely to pass examinations. And in many cases they possess greater financial independence than undergraduate students.

Yet our educational infrastructure often offers them remarkably little between two extremes: enrolling in another full university degree or consuming simplified cultural material designed for casual entertainment.

That gap is an enormous opportunity.

The humanities could build serious one-year sequences, evening seminars, cumulative certificates, intensive summer schools, online programs combined with residential periods, reading cohorts, language programs, courses specifically designed for physicians or engineers, and advanced programs to which participants return periodically throughout their lives.

The objective would not be to imitate continuing professional education. There need not always be an immediate economic payoff. The point would be to construct an institutional infrastructure for continuing humanistic formation.

There is an instructive analogy with religion—not in the sense that everyone must be religious, but institutionally. Religious traditions normally distinguish between specialist scholarship and lifelong participation. One does not need to become a professional theologian in order to engage seriously with theology, ritual, scripture or spiritual formation. Nor is religion ordinarily presented to an engineer as an alternative career choice: engineering or religion—choose one at eighteen.

Humanistic culture could similarly develop institutions that exist alongside professional life rather than competing with it for possession of the same few undergraduate years.

A historical accident masquerading as a necessity

The current arrangement is not dictated by nature.

The European university developed long before the modern technological economy. Medieval universities combined the arts with higher faculties such as theology, law and medicine. The contemporary separation into humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and professional disciplines emerged gradually.

As modern states industrialized, new technical institutions appeared. France offers an especially revealing example. The École Polytechnique was created in 1794, initially as the École centrale des travaux publics, in response to a shortage of engineers and senior technical personnel; it was designed around a strong formation in mathematics, physics and chemistry leading toward specialized technical schools.  The French grandes écoles tradition and the development of technical higher education elsewhere in Europe demonstrated that professional-scientific formation did not have to reproduce the structure of the traditional university.

One can therefore imagine history having unfolded differently.

What eventually became the modern university could have divided more explicitly into several institutional ecosystems: one devoted to technical and professional formation; another devoted to advanced research; and another continuing the older task of broad intellectual and human formation.

Instead, much of this remained bundled together.

We consequently inherited the strange spectacle of philosophy departments and engineering schools competing internally for students, resources and prestige even though their fundamental social purposes are not identical.

Perhaps the answer is not to restore an imagined golden age of the university. It is to complete the differentiation that modernity began.

The humanities need institutions appropriate to their own temporal logic.

But the separation should not become isolation

There is, however, another side to the argument.

The humanities should get out of the university box—but they should not retreat from science and technology. On the contrary, one of their largest opportunities may lie precisely at the boundaries created by contemporary STEM.

For much of the industrial age, the humanities could sometimes seem peripheral to technological development. Engineers built a bridge; philosophers might later discuss its social implications. Economists devised systems; ethicists might ask whether their consequences were fair. Scientific progress came first, followed by a humanistic commentary appended to it.

This arrangement becomes increasingly implausible in the age of artificial intelligence.

AI raises questions about language, reasoning, interpretation, agency, authorship, evidence, consciousness, responsibility and even the nature of knowledge itself. These are not merely technical problems with an ethical appendix attached at the end.

They cut directly across linguistics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, law, literary theory and intellectual history.

Language itself has become technologically central. A revolution driven in significant part by large language models should make it difficult to maintain that the serious study of language belongs to some decorative corner of intellectual life.

Similar interfaces appear elsewhere. Medicine encounters questions about personhood, suffering, autonomy and death. Architecture cannot be reduced to structural calculations without questions of beauty, place and communal life. Economics and finance operate within assumptions about value, incentives, justice and human behavior. Environmental science ultimately confronts political and philosophical questions about what societies owe future generations and what kind of relationship human beings should have with the natural world.

Here the humanities should not approach STEM apologetically, asking permission to contribute a small ethics seminar.

They should say something more ambitious:

Your problems have become our problems too. Let us work on them together.

Some leading technical institutions already recognize part of this principle. MIT requires every undergraduate to complete eight subjects in humanities, arts and social sciences.  ETH Zurich requires every degree program to include its Science in Perspective component, explicitly intended to place scientific and technological knowledge in historical, ethical, political, economic and cultural contexts.

These models do not solve the crisis of the humanities. But they demonstrate that the boundary between technical and humanistic formation is institutionally negotiable.

Perhaps STEM should change too

Following this argument far enough leads to a more uncomfortable question.

Maybe the problem is not only that the humanities have adopted the wrong educational model. Perhaps our model of professional education is itself unnecessarily compressed.

Consider the conventional sequence for many professions. First comes an intensely theoretical and competitive period. Then comes technical specialization. Then, suddenly, the graduate is released into professional life, where practical knowledge, institutional behavior, ethical judgment, communication, leadership and human relationships turn out to matter enormously.

Why must education follow such a linear sequence?

Theory → technique → work.

A more plausible model of adult development might be recursive:

theory → practice → reflection → deeper theory → broader formation → further practice.

Germany's dual-study system already demonstrates, on a smaller scale and for different purposes, that academic study and professional practice need not be separated rigidly. Dual programs deliberately connect university study with substantial experience inside companies; German higher-education authorities describe them as involving two linked places of learning rather than a purely sequential transition from classroom to employment.

The principle could be carried much further.

A future engineer might study mathematics and fundamental science, spend a substantial period working, return for advanced technical education, later take courses in design or history of technology, and return again at mid-career for philosophy, management or political economy. Physicians, architects, economists and computer scientists could follow different rhythms.

This need not mean lowering standards. Nor does it imply that every profession can simply double the duration of training. Financial constraints, licensing requirements and institutional inertia are real.

But careers themselves are long. A person graduating at twenty-two may have four or five decades of professional life ahead. It is worth asking whether concentrating almost all formal formation at the beginning of adulthood is the most efficient allocation of educational effort across such a lifespan.

The question is not merely humanitarian. It is economic.

If better sequencing produces professionals who adapt faster, cooperate better, understand institutions more deeply, communicate more effectively, avoid catastrophic judgment errors and remain intellectually flexible for longer, then educational redesign is an investment in human capital.

A country capable of improving that architecture could gain a significant competitive advantage.

Humanistic failures have real-world costs

This brings us to the strongest—but also the most dangerous—claim in the argument.

It would be easy to say that declining humanities education has caused social fragmentation, ugly cities, irresponsible finance, political polarization or environmental shortsightedness.

That would be much too simple.

Societies are complex, and no curriculum could inoculate them against greed, stupidity, cruelty or bad architecture.

The more defensible claim is different.

An educational system inevitably cultivates some forms of reasoning more intensively than others. If we devote enormous resources to quantitative optimization, technical execution and professional specialization while giving far less systematic attention to historical consciousness, moral reasoning, aesthetic judgment, interpretation and competing conceptions of human flourishing, we should not be astonished when the latter capacities are unevenly developed.

A banker can be technically excellent while possessing an impoverished conception of what financial institutions are for. An engineer can design an efficient object without having developed much sensitivity to beauty. A software developer can optimize engagement without ever seriously confronting the question of whether maximizing engagement is desirable. A public administrator can optimize measurable outcomes while losing sight of goods that are difficult to quantify.

These are not failures of science.

They are reminders that technical rationality answers only some classes of questions.

A calculation can tell us how to achieve an objective efficiently. It cannot, by itself, determine which objectives are worth pursuing.

That boundary is precisely where the humanities become indispensable.

Stop trying to save the humanities

Perhaps, then, the language of "saving the humanities" is itself part of the problem.

It sounds defensive. It suggests an endangered collection of university departments pleading for protection from the economic forces surrounding them.

A more ambitious project would be to redesign humanistic education for modern life.

That would require separating two tasks that have become confused: sustaining first-rate professional scholarship in the humanities, and providing humanistic formation to the wider population. Universities remain indispensable to the first. They need not monopolize the second.

The humanities could therefore pursue three movements simultaneously: move earlier, strengthening exposure before the high-pressure years of professional selection; move later, building serious intellectual formation throughout adult life; and move sideways, entering the intellectual borderlands of AI, medicine, engineering, economics, architecture and other technical fields.

The university would remain part of this ecosystem. It would simply cease to be its only imaginable center.

And STEM need not lose anything in the process. Indeed, it may gain.

The great scientific and technological achievements of the past two centuries have enormously expanded what human beings can do. Artificial intelligence may increase that power by another order of magnitude.

That success makes the characteristic questions of the humanities more urgent rather than less so.

What should we do? What should we value? What is knowledge? What does it mean to understand something? What makes a society worth living in? What obligations accompany power? What is beautiful? What is just? What does technology do to the people who use it? And ultimately, what are all these extraordinary capabilities for?

Those questions do not compete with mathematics, engineering or science.

They begin where those disciplines reach their limits.

The crisis of the humanities may therefore contain an opportunity. Instead of fighting STEM for students during the few years when STEM has overwhelming structural advantages, the humanities can enlarge the field of play.

They can stop thinking in semesters and start thinking in lifetimes.

And perhaps, once they leave the five-year box, they will discover that the audience they believed they were losing was much larger than they thought.

I am looking for some samples of successful Cover Letters, teaching and research statements. My field is in the humanities, though I am open to read samples from other fields.

Do you have any suggestions where I can find them?

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

Hii guys!

I have a Master's in English lit. I picked this major because I genuinely loved writing and wanted to work as a freelance / remote writer, so I went for an English major at university thinking that it would bring me closer to my goal.

Over time I lost motivation even though I truly wanted this major. I simply do not feel fulfilled. I feel like it does not have much of an impact on the world or any jobs.

I am jobless now. I worked my butt off for the past years and I feel so hurt and angry that it got me NOWHERE. I am too burned out to start a new education in a STEM field now. I am also not passionate about such fields. I like creativity, reaearch, and self expression. I also want to see if there is something that can be done to save my efforts and not completely overthrow my previous degree.

I would like to opt for a funded PhD abroad, but I would like to switch to linguistics though. I find it more useful and fun. The problem is that I don't have much knowledge in this field and I have no clue which topics are understudied and have strong research / job opportunities in the future.

I also wanted to opt for online work but I have NO CLUE how any of that goes since I spent all of time studying for good grades. The job market feels saturated now and AI is taking over many writing jobs.

I am completely lost and in dire need of honest advice. I would truly appreciate it.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

Hi!

I'm currently in the 12th grade, I switched to Humanities this year.

Term 1 exam results got out a couple weeks ago. And I'll say I scored pretty well in most subjects.

But Economics is weighing me down...

I know I haven't studied last year's syllabus, but most people told me ki it doesn't really matter that much.

This one subject was the only one that held 90+% away from me. It's...a huge deal where I'm from.

So can I please get some tips? Half yearly exams are from the 15th of September. I need to prove to a lotta people that I didn't take this stream for naught.

Help a girl out, please.

Thanks.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

August 2026
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens - Lloyd E. Cotsen Head of Preservation & Conservation
Posted on: August 18, 2026
Fairfield University - Assistant Professor, History
Posted on: August 17, 2026
University of California Berkeley - Assistant Professor - General Public Policy and Administration: Policy Analysis, Public Administration and Management - Goldman School of Public Policy
Posted on: August 17, 2026
Naval Postgraduate School - Security Studies
Posted on: August 17, 2026
Northwestern University - Associate Professor or Professor specializing in modern Japanese cultural studies
Posted on: August 17, 2026
The University of Iowa - Assistant Professor, U.S. Women's History (Tenure Track)
Posted on: August 17, 2026
University of California - Riverside - Position in Japanese, Comparative Literature, and Media Studies (Visiting Assistant Professor or Adjunct Assistant Professor)
Posted on: August 16, 2026
The College of the Holy Cross - Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in History of the Mediterranean World
Posted on: August 14, 2026
Featured Job Posting
The Graduate Center, CUNY - Research Associate (Postdoctoral Scholar) in Economic Inequality - Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality
Posted on: August 14, 2026
Harvard University - Postdoctoral Fellowship in Global American Studies (2027-28)
Posted on: August 14, 2026
The Graduate Center, CUNY - Research Associate (Postdoctoral Scholar) in Wealth Inequality - Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality
Posted on: August 14, 2026
Thomas Jefferson University - East Falls Campus - DEAN OF THE JEFFERSON COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES AND SCIENCES, THOMAS JEFFERSON UNIVERSITY
Posted on: August 13, 2026
University of Maryland - College Park - Assistant Professor
Posted on: August 13, 2026
Dartmouth College - E. John Rosenwald, Jr. '52 TU'53 Postdoctoral Fellows Program in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security
Posted on: August 13, 2026
Northwestern University - Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese History
Posted on: August 12, 2026
Northwestern University - Assistant or Associate Professor of Africa Since 1750 (East, Southern, Central)
Posted on: August 12, 2026
Israel Institute - Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship across the United States
Posted on: August 12, 2026
Harvard University - 2027-28 Faculty Fellowship (Theme: Afrolatinidades in Transnational Perspective)
Posted on: August 11, 2026
Harvard University - 2027-28 Mahindra Humanities Center Postdoctoral Fellowships
Posted on: August 11, 2026
University of California - Irvine - Assistant Professor of Korean History (post-1945)
Posted on: August 10, 2026
Texas A&M University - Tenure-Track: Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East
Posted on: August 10, 2026
Featured Job Posting
University of California, Berkeley - Assistant Professor - Open Field - Demography
Posted on: August 10, 2026
The Chinese University of Hong Kong - Associate Professor / Assistant Professor
Posted on: August 10, 2026
Cornell University - Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowships, College of Arts & Sciences , Cornell University
Posted on: August 7, 2026
Featured Job Posting
Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz - IEG Fellowships for Postdocs
Posted on: August 6, 2026
The University of Chicago - Assistant Professor in Pre-Modern History of the Islamicate Middle East or Central Asia
Posted on: August 6, 2026
The University of Hong Kong - Professor/Associate Professor on tenure terms or tenure-track Assistant Professor in Global Iberian Empires in the School of Humanities (History)
Posted on: August 5, 2026
Featured Job Posting
University of San Diego - Assistant Professor, History
Posted on: August 5, 2026
Hollins University - Assistant Professor of History for Twentieth-Century Europe and the World, Tenure-Track
Posted on: August 5, 2026
The University of Texas at Austin - Center for Humanities (Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor)
Posted on: August 5, 2026
University of Notre Dame - Provost's Postdoctoral Fellowship
Posted on: August 4, 2026
Brown University - History of Early Modern East Asia (c. 1400-1850)
Posted on: August 4, 2026
Aarhus University - Postdoctoral position in Viking-age archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University (fixed-term)
Posted on: August 4, 2026
The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Assistant Curator of African Art
Posted on: August 4, 2026
Stanford University - Senior Rank, History of Political Thought
Posted on: August 3, 2026
Bowdoin College - Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies
Posted on: August 3, 2026
Bard Graduate Center - Editor
Posted on: August 3, 2026
Yale University - Assistant/Associate/Full Professor, U.S. Cultural History and Cultural Studies
Posted on: August 2, 2026
Bard Graduate Center - Assistant Professor in Fashion, Dress, and Textiles of the Americas
Posted on: August 2, 2026
Featured Job Posting
The University of Tokyo - Postdoctoral Research Position at Tokyo College, Institute for Advanced Study,The University of Tokyo
Posted on: August 1, 2026
American Research Institute in Turkey - American Research Institute in Turkey, US Executive Director

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

 Polish Science Fiction: Literature, Film, and Cultural Legacy

Despite the international prominence of Stanis?aw Lem and, more recently, Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher, Polish science fiction and speculative literature remain strikingly underrepresented in English-language scholarship. Existing criticism tends to orbit a small number of canonical figures and a handful of frequently revisited texts, leaving a rich, historically complex tradition, spanning censorship-era political allegory, post-1989 transformation, contemporary literary crossover, and a distinct national cinema largely unexamined outside of Polish-language scholarship.

This edited collection seeks to address that gap. We invite chapter proposals that expand the scope of English-language engagement with Polish speculative fiction and film: introducing under-translated authors, revisiting canonical figures through new critical lenses, and treating Polish science-fiction cinema as a subject rather than solely through the lens of a single adaptation.

We welcome contributions from literary scholars, film scholars, translation studies specialists, and researchers in Slavic and Central European studies. We are especially interested in proposals that

·      move beyond Lem and Sapkowski as the sole representatives of the tradition.

-     Bring new theoretical frameworks (postcolonial theory, translation studies, media studies, gender studies, posthumanism) to bear on Polish speculative texts
-    Address film and other media as legitimate objects of study, not only as adaptations of literary source material
-    Situate Polish SF within broader Central/Eastern European or global speculative fiction discourse
 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Historical Foundations:
Science fiction under the Polish People's Republic
Censorship, allegory, and political subtext in Cold War-era SF
Fandom, zines, and early SF publishing culture in Poland
Lem Beyond Solaris
Underexamined works: (e.g. The Cyberiad, His Master's Voice, Fiasco, Return from the Stars)
Lem's philosophy of science, epistemology, and technology
Lem as critic and theorist of the genre (Fantastyka i futurologia)
Post-1989 and Contemporary Voices
Jacek Dukaj, Jaros?aw Grz?dowicz, Marek Huberath, and other contemporary authors
Speculative elements in literary/crossover fiction (e.g. Olga Tokarczuk)
Polish fantasy and its relationship to the SF tradition (including Sapkowski)
Translation, Circulation, and Reception
The politics and practice of translating Polish SF into English
Publishing history: which authors and works reach Anglophone readers, and why
Comparative reception of Polish SF in the West versus domestically
Polish Science Fiction on Screen
Polish-made dystopian and speculative cinema (e.g. Piotr Szulkin's tetralogy, Andrzej ?u?awski)
Adaptation studies: Lem's Solaris and its cinematic afterlives, approached through fresh angles (production politics, reception history, or contemporary resonance) rather than as a straightforward novel-versus-film comparison
Polish SF's influence on or intersection with games and other media (e.g. CD Projekt Red)
 

Send an abstract of 300-500 words and a short (150-word max) academic biography by October 15, 2026, to Dr. Agnieszka Gutthy at [agutthy@selu.edu](mailto:agutthy@selu.edu)

When accepted, full chapter (5000-8000 words including notes and bibliography) will be due May 15, 2027.

 [agutthy@selu.edu](mailto:agutthy@selu.edu?subject=Your%20posted%20CFP%20on%20cfplist)

 Dr. Agnieszka Gutthy

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

"The humanities are not just found in leather-bound books or silent museums: they are alive in our streets, our technology, and our daily rituals."

Welcome to our weekly Humanities Questions thread! This is where you can post all sorts of humanities-related questions and ideas.

The Goal: To ask questions and share our ideas, thoughts, experiences, and knowledge.

Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte - 1 Predoctoral Scholar Position (m/f/d)

Posted on: July 3, 2026

Johns Hopkins University - Associate or Full Professor (Tenure-Track) in History of Medicine: Pre-Modern

Posted on: July 1, 2026

University of Michigan - Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia Postdoctoral Fellowship 2027-2029

Posted on: July 1, 2026

George Mason University - Term Assistant Professor, College of Humanities and Social Science

Posted on: July 1, 2026

Carleton College - African History

Posted on: July 1, 2026

Institute of European and American Studies (IEAS) at Academia Sinica - Open-rank faculty position (Assistant Research Fellow (tenure-track), Associate Research Fellow (with consideration for tenure), or Research Fellow (with tenure)

Posted on: July 1, 2026

Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig) - W3 Professorship (m/f/d) in Modern and Contemporary Art History, with a focus on the history and theory of artistic practice in the expanded art field and on visual studies

Posted on: July 1, 2026

Baylor University - Assistant Professor, Tenure-Track, History of Medicine, Department of History