Now that the notion of the Anthropocene is more than a quarter century old, it is possible to review its career. With a special focus on the notion’s trajectory in literary studies, this chapter assesses that career in three ways. First, it makes the language-theoretical point that the Anthropocene is less a rigid denominator than a necessary misnomer: a term that cannot possibly capture the vast realities it is assumed to name, and is better thought of as a catalyst for debate. This helps explain why the recent dismissal of the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic unit hardly affects the term’s popularity. Second, it tracks the development of the term in literary studies to show how a term that initially signaled ecological urgency began to signify theoretical complexity in the 2010s and, somewhat later, also an increasing awareness of diversity. Third, it underlines that the particular way in which literary studies conceives of the Anthropocene is affected by the specific affordances of literature, which is reflected in the association of the Anthropocene with interdisciplinarity, multiscalarity, embodied experience, the ontology of writing, and a mood of impending disaster.

Language teacher educators (LTEs) are a core group of stakeholders who greatly influence the development of future language teachers and, by extension, their future learners. In this exploratory study, we sought to investigate the emotional experiences of five English LTEs from Austria with the help of semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed inductively, in multiple stages, and revealed how the LTEs’ emotions were influenced by the interplay between their personal psychologies and the socio-cultural contexts in which they lived and worked. These findings support an integrative theoretical perspective on LTE emotions interconnecting the social and psychological facets of emotions. The analysis also showed how the LTEs’ emotions varied in valence depending on the context with a notable difference between their emotions in the classroom compared to their emotions in respect to their workplace more generally. As such, the findings raise fascinating questions about the saliency and weighting of emotions across contexts even within one job.

This introduction reflects on the conceptual benefits, challenges, and limits of putting into conversation military history and global history. It regards the two world wars as times of both disruption and heightened connectedness. Severed trade, breaches in diplomatic relations, enforced immobility, and economic sanctions were paired with new connections, contacts, networks, emulations, and reroutings. Four key perspectives define the volume’s approach. First, decentering the study of the world wars widens the geographic, chronological, and social scope of historians’ outlook, introducing a more diverse historical narrative. Second, focusing on the mobility of people, ideas, and goods, which the world wars both engendered and deepened, raises important questions about what was absorbed, adapted, and rejected as part of these circulations. Third, emphasizing encounters helps to show the impact of global warfare at the local level, highlights the transformation of individual and collective identities, and forces a reflection on the lives of those who remained untouched, at least apparently, by faraway events. Finally, this volume explores global languages: the shared systems of conceptualization and communication – including commemorative practices and international and humanitarian law – which developed on account of the world wars’ extreme violence.

This chapter clarifies how some experimental narratives aim to offer what could be described as a multispecies perspective. From Sherman “Green World” to Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, and from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, we can re-experience their “passionate immersion,” a key concept proposed by Thom van Dooren as well as Anna Tsing. This immersion involves a deep connection with both living and non-living things, including machines, almost all of which can collectively be referred to as “critters” in Donna Haraway’s terminology. Invoking Ursula K. Heise’s concept of “multispecies justice,” this chapter evaluates these multinational literary works as innovative yet standard exemplars of multispecies stories, primarily due to their consistent acknowledgment of non-human and posthuman existence. These works encompass both larger and smaller organisms, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses, as significant kin of human beings. The chapter employs a re-interpretive approach, examining a range of literary forms from postmodern novels to epic graphic novels that tell multispecies stories as descendants of Scheherazade in the “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” or, in Haraway’s terminology again, the “Chthulucene.”

“Slavery and abolition” are simultaneously ubiquitous and obscured in the Romantic era. While contemporary scholarship now makes slavery more apprehensible, it has also become a representative limit for what Blackness can mean and do in the period. The two sections in this chapter seek to revise Romantic notions of resistance and of libertation. The first, on slavery, looks to the period’s slave rebellions and figures of enslavement to propose new means of reading Romanticism and new modes of Romantic reading. The second looks to “abolition” for a revolutionary alternative to Romantic amelioration. Both sections turn to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “destituent power” to explore how slavery and abolition continue to trouble our ideas of captivity and liberation, institutionalization and revolution.

This chapter interprets the Anthropocene as a stage in the emergence of deep time as a concept in Western culture beginning in the eighteenth century. The literary histories of deep time and the Anthropocene converge in many places. Like theorists of the Anthropocene today, earlier writers on deep time explored the divergence and convergence of human and natural histories while also reflecting on cultural variation in the articulation of these two notionally separate histories. This chapter traces the popular science of deep time through the writings of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), Hugh Miller (1802-1856), and George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), the American geographer who is sometimes regarded as a founder of the Anthropocene concept as well. These writings promote the specialization of the modern geosciences and set them off against “unscientific” long-scale cosmologies. Though it inherits their colonial bias, the Anthropocene frame can facilitate our recovery of these non-Western cosmologies intertwined with the history of deep time. The age of the earth, the newness of our species, and other geological canons of deep time may once again be considered side-by-side with other knowledge and memory practices that bear on these ideas, as they were by early geological thinkers.

This chapter highlights the interlaced histories of race-making and warfare in the early twentieth century, exploring how the emboldened demands for racial equality emerging across the globe during the First World War altered the conceptual foundations of white supremacy in the United States. Knitting together the case studies of Mexican rebels in southern Texas and Indian anti-colonialists in San Francisco and New York, it recounts the international origins of a coalescing national security logic used to justify unequal categories of citizenship. Namely, white Americans’ successful denunciation of various quests for increased social rights as inherently foreign not only enforced a racially exclusionary definition of loyalty to the nation and its war effort but also fueled the rise of discriminatory investigative practices at the hands of the modern surveillance state. Indeed, the First World War triggered a dramatic and permanent transformation in the American intelligence apparatus, which increasingly essentialized nonwhite groups as untrustworthy on the basis of their assumed liability to foreign subversion.

In April 2016, in the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks, a more severe criminal prosecution policy was implemented, and terrorism cases involving individuals returning from the Iraqi-Syrian front were systematically transferred to the Special Assize Court. Previously heard at the 16th Chamber of the lower court, the Assize Court now had the authority to impose much longer prison sentences for these cases. These are the ’second generation’ trials. Most of these cases involved ’returnees,’ often without victims or civil parties, and sometimes even without the defendants themselves, who were presumed dead. These cases also included a second type of trial in which terror acts were committed.

The Assize Court has the authority to impose the most severe punishments. However, appearing before the Assize Court entails a prolonged judicial process that is unique to this jurisdiction. This chapter examines the tensions and dynamics that arose following the 2016 change in prosecution policy and the transfer of cases to the Assize Court. Beyond judicial disagreements, unexpected outcomes emerged as the court came to know the accused more closely, revealing a more complex reality.

If emotions constitute a central part of teachers’ professional lives (Hargreaves, 1998), it is plausible to hypothesize that becoming and being a language teacher educator could be a highly emotional process as well. To date, while research on teacher emotions has been highly vibrant and fruitful, scant attention has been paid to teacher educators’ emotions, particularly in the field of second language education (Yuan et al., 2022). As documented by existing literature (e.g., Izadinia, 2014; Yuan & Yang, 2022), teacher educators often face various challenges (e.g., a heavy workload and the research-practice divide) in their daily work, and they may struggle with the emotional and intellectual distance between their current professionalism and the expected performance in teacher education (Intrator & Kunzman, 2009; Nazari et al., 2024). Nevertheless, the emotional state of teacher educators is interconnected with their personal well-being, as well as the motivation and quality of teachers, ultimately influencing classroom instruction and student learning (Day & Leitch, 2001). Scholars (e.g., Hagenauer & Volet, 2014; Johnson & Golombek, 2020) have thus argued that teacher educators need to foster and maintain a sense of control over their emotions to facilitate their teaching of teachers.

The Introduction chapter provides an overview of the book’s content and approach. It explains the philosophical importance of Beauvoir’s varied output, including not only her essays but also her novels and memoirs. It presents the rigorous yet personal reading of Beauvoir’s works that characterises the book, as well as its focus on their relevance for reflecting on current issues. The Introduction also provides an overview of the reception of Beauvoir’s work and the prejudices that have obscured the philosophical importance of her writings, notably sexism and an unwarranted exclusion of her novels and memoirs from her philosophical output.