The 2025 volume of the Yearbook of English Studies reflects on the current state of English as an academic discipline. It uses the history of the Yearbook itself as one prompt to this endeavour. Some of the essays that follow thus reflect on the changing fortunes and preoccupations of areas of specialism within English Studies, focusing for instance on the history of 'rhetoric' within this field, or on the tensions at play in considerations of early modern epic across the last few decades of criticism. Selected past essays from the Yearbook are reprinted alongside these reflections to support and evidence