• 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...

• 配置：三十年回顾
• 梅丽莎·M·利特菲尔德和拉贾尼·苏丹

尽管你们中的许多人都知道《Configurations》是文学、科学和艺术协会的期刊，但您可能还没有参与它的创立或它从 SLS 到 SLSA 的转变。您可能熟悉该期刊当前的主题，但您可能不知道Configurations和 SLSA 在培育过去几十年中日益突出的许多跨学科（子）领域中发挥的重要作用：游戏研究、动物研究研究、环境人文、图形医学和电子文学，更不用说与神经科学、数学和生物技术以及历史学术的众多文学/科学交叉。您手中握着或在屏幕上看到的是跨学科和跨学科活动的学术蜂巢，它是由几代学者塑造和支持的。

值此 30 周年之际，SLSA 和Configurations背后的人们值得庆祝，因此本期杂志是对他们保持这种奇特而美妙的想法、项目、人员和学术投资的活力和良好融合的一种鼓励。有很多人值得感谢，包括最初的科学家和人文主义者团体，他们于 1993 年成立了当时的文学与科学协会及其期刊。正如您将在本集的最初回顾性文章中看到的那样，多个机构的许多人都在努力反驳“文学和科学彼此无关”的假设。布鲁诺·拉图尔 (Bruno Latour)、罗尔德·霍夫曼 (Roald Hoffmann) 和史蒂芬·韦宁格 (Stephan Weininger) 等科学研究和科学领域的著名人物与同样杰出的人文学科[完第 287 页]学者 — N. 凯瑟琳·海尔斯、乔治·卢梭和桑德·吉尔曼——建立一个跨学科思想能够真正蓬勃发展的论坛。

作为该杂志过去 10 年的联合编辑，我们有幸与初级和高级学者合作，致力于推进 SLSA 的理念，并挑战文学和科学学术“算数”的界限。我们专门讨论了一些主题，为那些对配置可以有效发挥作用的想法的编辑腾出空间：腐烂（25.1），保持时间（23.2），免疫（25.3），动物标本剥制术（27.2）和海洋（27.4），仅举几例。我们看到了人们对文学和科学的热情，因此我们将期刊从每年三期增至四期；但我们也面临着疫情的挑战，包括劳动力短缺和工作/生活平衡问题，这使得学者们很难不间断地继续他们的研究议程。

毫无疑问，二十一世纪的人文学科面临着新的挑战。像我们这样的跨学科协会和期刊提供了一种独特的方式来反驳那些无关紧要、唯我论和不切实际的主张。如果您仔细阅读《配置》杂志的任何一期或参加 SLSA 小组，您就会毫不怀疑跨学科学术的相关性和潜力，这些学术正在为我们这个时代的棘手问题建立新的联系。但 SLSA 和配置也反映了成功的负担。1993年，SLS是唯一一个为文学和科学研究提供环境的组织。2023 年，无数的学会和期刊致力于科学和文学研究的各个方面。随着人文学科不断分化为跨学科子领域，我们希望学者们能够继续回到这本基础期刊，贡献原创性研究，并承担起将初级学者带入仍然充满活力的文学和科学领域的任务。

在我们对本期的规划中，我们希望捕捉期刊和社会的影响，因此我们向对这两个领域都有基础的学者征集了短文（约 5000 字），并发布了一份通用的 CFP 要求论文和反思SLSA 和配置对学术的影响方式。我们收到了压倒性的积极回应，并自豪地推出了这套文章，这些文章仅反映了该组织及其无数参与者的广度和深度的一小部分。

开头部分“反思”提供了对该组织丰富历史和……的看法。