Each year, the Center for Comparative Literature and Society hosts a major conference on a topic related to the broad mission of the Center—soon to be Institute—and the issues confronting interdisciplinary and comparative intellectual practice today.  Past conferences have addressed questions of translation, new methods of comparative analysis, comparative secularisms and religious representation, and the relationship between literature and social justice. This year, our conference will be devoted to the role of journals in cultivating and sustaining interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship.  Our goal is to generate a conversation among journal editors that focuses on the journal, its limits and possibilities, as a necessary and often underestimated dimension of the cultural infrastructure within which we all work.  We are challenged by a number of questions: To what extent does the journal, as a form, promote interdisciplinary and comparative work in ways that exceed the fact of juxtaposition?  How well are journals equipped to assess work from a variety of fields?  Can journals promote multilingualism?  What are the institutional and cultural possibilities for ensuring that translation and its publication take place in and by journals? To what degree is journal content dictated by the bureaucratic structures of disciplinary associations?  How does the idea of the “theme issue” influence, constrain or perhaps enhance the possibilities for interdisciplinary publishing? Has the concept of peer review changed in recent years?  How has the political economy of journal publishing changed in the last decade?  How does the circulation of journals shape or transgress the social, political, economic and technological structures dividing the global South and North?  In addition to these broad questions, we are eager to hear how you conceive of your particular journals’ purpose. What epistemological and/or political commitments structure your mission, and the kinds of work that you seek to publish?