By Kristen LaRue-Sandler — September 4, 2026
Five faculty members and a graduate student in the ASU Department of English announce volumes recently published or imminently forthcoming. Works include a "green" cultural history, an educational how-to, and three journal issues. They cover topics of gardens, book-banning, writing instruction, immigration, and language and technology.
‘The Garden: Our 4,000 Year Quest for Paradise’ (U.K. edition) (HarperCollins / William Collins, 2026)
Coming in October in the U.K., Jonathan Bate’s newest book is “a global journey through garden history, art and philosophy.” From the publisher:
- “From the Garden of Eden to Gethsemane, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the pleasure gardens of Versailles, from the Zen gardens of Kyoto to the landscapes of Capability Brown and New York's High Line, the garden has always been far more than somewhere to grow things.
It is where humanity has worked out its relationship with the natural world — the place where culture, spirituality and nature converge. An inspiration for poets, painters and philosophers across four thousand years and every civilisation on earth.
In this magnificent work of scholarship, one of our greatest literary critics and cultural historians takes us on an extraordinary journey through the gardens of both the world and the human imagination. Sweeping in scope and ambition, this sumptuous and richly illustrated book reveals the garden as a place where we have always worked out our deepest longings for beauty, order, innocence and belonging. Drawing on poetry, painting, philosophy, mythology and religion — from Ovid and the Song of Solomon to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson — he shows how the garden has inspired our greatest art and consoled us in our darkest hours.
Here is the space where, as Andrew Marvell wrote, we may annihilate ‘all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade’ — that perfect, paradoxical stillness in which the mind empties itself into nature and finds itself restored.
Gardening is the most popular leisure activity in Britain. More than 27 million of us tend a plot, a window box, a rooftop or a patch of earth. Illustrated with more than 150 beautiful images, this book reminds us that it is to the garden, private and public, that we turn for solace, sustenance and sanity. It is a reminder that wherever we human beings have settled, we have reached, instinctively, towards the garden.”
Bate is Regents Professor of English and environmental humanities, with a joint appointment in the Department of English's literature program and the School of Sustainability.
‘Ban Censorship, Not Books: How Teachers, Schools, and Communities Can Fight for Intellectual Freedom’ (Teachers College Press, 2026)
James Joshua (Josh) Coleman’s monograph is also set for a timely release in October—National Book Month. From the publisher:
- “This book provides a practical, research-based road map for educators to navigate restrictive policies and maintain diverse, inclusive classrooms.
Books are being ripped from shelves, curricula redacted, and instruction forbidden at an unprecedented scale. As political polarization turns children’s literature into a proxy for national "culture wars," educators are left navigating sweeping, last-minute changes to their classrooms that threaten the inclusion of diverse voices.
‘Ban Censorship, Not Books’ provides a vital ‘bottom-up’ challenge to these restrictive policies by spotlighting the firsthand accounts of community members resisting censorship. Grounded in the real-world experiences of Iowa educators who successfully navigated the virulent Senate File 496, author Josh Coleman introduces the Local Resistance Framework (LRF). This flexible model empowers educators by helping them to know the law, understand their specific context, assess risk, and more.
This is a road map for any educator or community member determined to champion intellectual freedom. Through ‘from-teacher-for-teacher’ strategies and discipline-specific approaches for curriculum redesign, this book ensures that teachers can sustain an expansive, diversity-rich environment for their students, even in the most restrictive educational contexts.”
Coleman is an assistant professor in the Department of English’s English education program.
Writing & Pedagogy 16:3 (2026)
With Jonathan Marine and Gustaf B. Skar, Jessica Early and Vanessa Sullivan edited this journal special issue, themed “Approaches to Writing Instruction Around the World.” From the editors’ introduction:
- “This special issue of Writing & Pedagogy … brings together research and scholarship that examines writing instruction across a range of international settings and educational levels. The international contributions in this issue explore how writing pedagogy is conceptualized and enacted in teacher education, primary and secondary classrooms, curriculum development, and professional learning contexts. Together, these studies highlight the ways writing instruction is shaped by institutional structures, linguistic diversity, assessment systems, and teachers’ professional knowledge. Further, this issue highlights a range of frameworks, methodologies, and approaches for researching writing, ranging from classroom studies to meta-analysis. By presenting work from multiple national contexts, the issue aims to broaden conversations about writing instruction and provide insights into the varied conditions under which writing is taught and learned. The articles in this special issue demonstrate the enduring relevance, complexity, and fluidity of writing instruction across global contexts.”
Early is a professor in the Department of English, where she directs the English education program.
Sullivan is a PhD student in the Department of English’s English education program.
Twentieth-Century Literature 72:1 (March 2026)
With Katharina Wiedlack, Claudia Sadowski-Smith edited this journal special issue, themed “Revisiting US Post-Soviet and Ukrainian Immigrant Narratives After Russia's Invasions of Ukraine.” From the editors’ introduction:
- “This special issue explores the cultural production of US immigrants—writers, poets, and artists—from the former USSR and its successor states Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Their fiction, poetry, memoirs, and music reflect experiences shaped by migration and Soviet and Russian imperialism, while engaging with the intersecting dynamics of racialization, gender, class, and disability. Contributing to the decolonial turn in Slavic, (post-)Soviet, and East European studies, the essays trace how this work negotiates belonging, resists assimilation, and reimagines diasporic identity. They reposition (post-)Soviet migration within global frameworks of mobility, precarity, and cultural resistance, while situating (post-)Soviet and Ukrainian cultural production within US migration literature.”
Sadowski-Smith is a professor in the Department of English’s literature program.
CALICO 43:2 (June 2026)
With Oksana Vorobel, Bryan Smith edited this journal issue published by the University of Toronto Press for the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium. From the editors’ introduction:
- “In a previous editorial, Vorobel and Smith addressed several growing concerns in the field of computer-assisted language learning (CALL), including the rapid increase in commercial language learning products and the corresponding increase in “product studies” that often did not meet the theoretical and methodological expectations of scholarly research. …
Since then, the landscape has changed dramatically. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed not only the nature of CALL products, many of which integrate AI, but also the ways learners interact with them, the kinds of data they generate, and the assumptions underlying research design and interpretation. In this new context, the distinction between tool, system, and learning environment has become increasingly blurred. Although the core principles outlined in the 2020 editorial remain relevant, the rapid evolution of AI-mediated technologies calls for reconsideration of what constitutes a CALL product, how such products should be studied, and what standards should guide their publication in venues such as the CALICO Journal.”
Smith is a professor in the Department of English’s linguistics and applied linguistics program, where he also directs the Graduate CALL Certificate.