Configurations: A Thirty-Year Retrospective

Configurations: A Thirty-Year Retrospective Melissa M. Littlefield and Rajani Sudan Although many of you know that Configurations is the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, you may not have been around for its founding or its shift from SLS to SLSA. You may be familiar with the journal’s current themes, but you may not be aware of the significant roles that Configurations and SLSA played in fostering so many of the interdisciplinary (sub)fields that have risen to prominence in the past decades: game studies, animal studies, the environmental humanities, graphic medicine, and electronic literature(s), not to mention numerous literature/science crossovers into neuroscience, mathematics, and biotechnology, as well as historical scholarship. What you hold in your hands or see on your screen is an academic hive of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary activity—one that has been shaped and supported by several generations of scholars. At this 30-year mark, the people behind SLSA and Configurations deserve to be celebrated, so this issue is a metaphorical pat on the back for keeping this strange and wonderful mélange of ideas, projects, people, and academic investments alive and well. There are so many who deserve thanks, including the original group of scientists and humanists who established in 1993 what was then known as the Society for Literature and Science, and its journal. As you’ll see in the initial retrospective essays in this collection, many individuals across several institutions worked diligently to counter assumptions that literature and science have nothing to do with one another. Renowned figures in science studies and science such as Bruno Latour, Roald Hoffmann, and Stephan Weininger collaborated with equally eminent humanities [End Page 287] scholars—N. Katherine Hayles, George Rousseau, and Sander Gilman—to establish a forum where interdisciplinary thought could truly flourish. As co-editors of the journal for the past 10 years, we have had the privilege of working with junior and senior scholars invested in carrying the ideas of SLSA forward—and challenging the boundaries of what “counts” as literature and science scholarship. We’ve devoted some issues to themes, making space for editors who had ideas about where Configurations could fruitfully go: putrefaction (25.1), keeping time (23.2), immunity (25.3), taxidermy (27.2), and oceans (27.4), to name a few. We saw so much enthusiasm for literature and science that we expanded the journal from three to four issues a year; but we’ve also confronted the challenges of the pandemic, including labor shortages and work/life balance issues that have made it difficult for scholars to continue their research agendas uninterrupted. There is no doubt that the humanities are facing new challenges in the twenty-first century; interdisciplinary societies and journals such as ours offer a unique way to push back against claims of irrelevance, solipsism, and impracticality. If you peruse any issue of Configurations or sit in on an SLSA panel, you’d have no doubt about the relevance and potential for interdisciplinary scholarship that’s making new connections across the wicked problems of our time. But SLSA and Configurations also reflect the burden of success. In 1993, SLS was the only organization that offered an environment for the study of literature and science. In 2023 myriad societies and journals are devoted to various aspects of scientific and literary studies. As the humanities continue to fragment into interdisciplinary subfields, our hope is that scholars will continue to return to this foundational journal, contribute original research, and take on the tasks of bringing junior scholars into the still-vibrant field of literature and science. In our planning for this issue, we wanted to capture the impacts of the journal and the society, so we solicited short essays (~5000 words) from scholars who were foundational to both, and we put out a general CFP requesting essays and reflections on the ways SLSA and Configurations have impacted scholarship. We received an overwhelmingly positive response and proudly present this set of essays that reflect just a small portion of the breadth and depth of this organization and its myriad participants. The preliminary section, “Reflections,” offers perspectives on the rich history of both the organization and...