Submission Deadline: Rolling Expected Publication: Fall 2026

A catalyst changes everything around it without being consumed in the process.

For our fifth issue, we are asking students to find the catalysts: the inputs that produce change out of proportion to their size, the moments that tip a system from one state into another, the people and ideas and accidents that set something in motion and then step back. We mean this literally — there is real chemistry, biology, and materials science here — and we mean it broadly. A protest, a paper, a piece of legislation, a single decision, a keystone species, a failed experiment that redirected a career: all of these catalyze. We want the ones you can actually investigate.

We are not looking for essays about how everything is connected to everything else. We are looking for work that picks one specific reaction — in a lab, a society, an ecosystem, a life, a text — and explains what made it go. Or what kept it from going: the catalyst that fizzled is often the more interesting study.

As always, the theme is a lens, not a fence. A careful history, a tight empirical study, a close reading, or a genuine result from the bench are all welcome — provided the connection to Catalyst is real rather than decorative.