Editorial board member Iza Hussin (University of Cambridge) and editor Mona Oraby (Amherst College) cocurated this forum that draws together scholars of religion, state, and society to initiate a conversation around translation and its place within the academic enterprise.

As they write in their introductory essay, “Rather than a concern with either fidelity of meaning or its reconstruction, between spaces and times, we consider translation in three linked dimensions: as labor and collaboration, as textual and institutional, and as circulatory and comparative. The essays gathered in this forum take the ubiquity of translation as a provocation to ask a range of questions: about the tensions inherent in transformations of language and text; about texts and institutions that do translative work across multiple registers for diverse audiences; about scholarly practices of comparison and conflation; about material archives and the work of memorialization and preservation; and about the circulation of translation in networks of knowledge, migration, pilgrimage, labor, exile, and empire.”

New contributions to this forum will be published through Summer 2021.