"Sense, Senses, Sensuality: Embodied Experiences in the Americas"
RIAS Vol. 22, Spring-Summer (1/2029)
Edited by Gabriela Vargas-Cetina and Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
Executive Editor: Gabriela Vargas-Cetina
Call open until Sept. 30th, 2027

The Americas have long been part of cultural traditions invoking the sensorial world. Peoples of and in the Americas have always made sense of their existence through their physical interaction with their immensely diverse geographies and ever-changing ethnoscapes. Henry David Thoreau admonished us that “we need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life” (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1839: 324). Across the Americas, the experience of the sensual has been a long-established theme in poetry, fiction and academic literature. The history of the Americas, from Pre-Columbian to contemporary peoples, has been continuously defined by the senses. More recently, poets, novelists, anthropologists, communication specialists, cultural studies scholars, linguists, historians, literary critics, philosophers, and sociologists, among others, have appealed to the sensorial in worlds past and present, and of the future fantastic (or the future dreadful). Through these various disciplinary approaches, there has been, since the 19th Century, an explosion of explorations of the embodiment, through sensorial and sensual experiences, of knowledges, and desires of and in the world. Through this thematic issue of RIAS, we aim at bringing together works from academics around the world, focusing on sensuality and the sensorial in the Americas.

We are soliciting papers dealing with all and any dimensions of the sensual and sensorial, seen through the lenses of the humanities and the arts. Approaches from American studies, literature, sociology, anthropology, history, drama, comparative religion, language, and communications are all welcome.

Important themes and questions to be explored include (but are not exhaustive or limiting):

• How is the sensorial and the sensuous manifested in classic American literature / Literature of the Americas?
• How can we map the knowledges and epistemologies associated with the sensual and/or sensorial in the social sciences in American Studies?
• If the different senses are gateways of knowledge, how is this knowledge embodied and what are its implications for social, cultural and acted out upon in the world in the Americas and beyond?
• What are the identity implications of sensuous and sensorial knowledges in the Americas and how are they expressed?
• How are the senses hierarchically conceptualized in different cultures? And what would these hierarchies look like? How are these hierarchies embodied, expressed and performed in the Americas?
• Is the orientation in space treated as one of the senses in schools of literature and social research programs across the Americas?
• What are the different ways to understand the senses within the Americas?
• How do sensuous and sensorial understandings and knowledges in the Americas have transformed local cultures and societies elsewhere?
• Is soft power a vehicle for diverse forms of embodiment and cultural re-consideration and perhaps re-ordering of sensuous and bodily hierarchies?
• How does the sensuous and sensorial relate to diverse forms of pleasure across the Americas, in literature, the arts and the social sciences?
• Is grief a form of sensorial mode in the Americas, whether regionally or locally?
• How are inter-sensoriality, the body and the particular senses taken into account in the arts and the social sciences in different regions of the Americas?
  
  

  Submission Guidelines: Articles should be between 4,000 and 6,000 words. For technical information, please consult Authors’ Guidelines (click here).

  Submission Deadline: The submissions should be delivered to the Review of International American Studies via its Online Journal System by September 30th, 2027.

  Selected contributors’ articles will enter a double-blind review process according to RIAS guidelines. Interdisciplinary approaches, comparative perspectives, and global engagements with American literature and culture are especially encouraged.

  Each submission MUST include:

  1. First Name and Family Name of the Author/Auther
     2. Institutional Affiliation of the Author/Auther
     3. Author/Auther's ORCID number (www.orcid.org)
     4. Author/Auther's website address
     5. Author/Auther's email address
     6. If the Author/Auther wishes to receive a complementary hard copy of the journal, the physical address to which the copy should be delivered
     7. The title of the article
     8. A 250-350 words’ abstract of the article
     9. A 250-350 words’ biographical note on the Author/Auther
     10. Keywords
     11. Disciplines represented (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines)
     12. The text of the article formatted in strict accordance with the principles of the MLA Handbook (9th edition) (length between 4000 and 6000 words).
     13. The bibliography of works cited formatted in strict accordance with the principles of the MLA Handbook (9th edition)
     15. All images must be submitted in print quality (min. 300 dpi)
     16. All copyrighted visual material must be accompanied by permissions or licenses issued to the Author.
     17. Along with the article text and required metadata, the Author must include a signed declaration on the use of artificial intelligence in the process of the preparation of the manuscript (click to download forms in the MS Word or PDF formats).
     
     

  IMPORTANT: Please bear in mind that incomplete or incorrect submissions will be automatically rejected.

  FOR TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS, PLEASE CONSULT THE AUTHORS’ GUIDELINES SECTION.