HISTORY 

The idea for Meridians began in conversations with Ruth Simmons in the spring of 1996, the first year of her presidency. She asked senior faculty in the Women's Studies Program if we would be willing to work with her to found a journal dedicated to women of color, a project she had conceived while at Princeton. From the earliest conversations, the project had twin goals, to establish a forum for publishing the work of women of color, where their work would be sought after and central rather than tokenized or marginal, and to establish a pipeline for recruiting and retaining feminist scholars of color into leadership positions at Smith. The Program incorporated a proposal to found such a journal among the new initiatives in our triennial review in May of 1996 and also in the college-wide self-study during 1996-97. In July 1996, interested women's studies faculty met to brainstorm the journal's possible shape and scope and to generate names for our editorial boards. In August, Gayle Pemberton, then chair of African American Studies at Wesleyan, and Rebecca Flewelling, special assistant to the president of Wesleyan, Douglas Bennet, met with Simmons to discuss collaborating with the University and Wesleyan University Press in the project. Gayle Pemberton and Simmons had been at Princeton together, where both had been involved in growing the African American Studies Program and gaining external grant support. Pemberton emphasized that, in recent grants to Black Studies departments, the Ford Foundation encouraged collaborative, regionally-based initiatives by more than one institution. She also cited Wesleyan's historical commitment to diversity in its student body and the potential to raise funds from alums

Although the proposal was not ranked among the top priorities to receive funding by the college committee by the college committee during the self-study in 1996-97, President Simmons encouraged us to continue planning and promised to find financial support outside the official college planning process. President Simons would later recall that she relished Meridians' "outlaw" history ("At the Meridians" conference, March 2001).

By the fall of 1997, the editorial collective, a self-selected subgroup of faculty in Women's Studies Program, was formed. The group included Ravina Aggarwal, Ann Ferguson, Ann Jones, Nancy Sternbach, Gayle Pemberton, and Susan Van Dyne, chair of Women's Studies, who served as coordinator. We invited Elizabeth Alexander, then Conkling poet in residence and director of the Poetry Center, to join us because of her wide network among poets and artists. As we conducted our research about other feminist journals, created a mission statement, nominated our boards, formulated policies, planned an operating budget and implementation timeline for seeking funding and publishing the first issue, we worked by consensus. We understood our mutual responsibilities to be making Meridians our top priority--to come to every meeting fully prepared, to share all information, to have equal voices in decision-making, and to take on additional tasks beyond our group meetings as equitably as possible. Our research included conversations with editors from Callaloo, Feminist Studies, Hopscotch, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Journal of Women's History, Transitions, and Yale Review, among others, about the functions and structure of the editorial office, forms of compensating editors, publishing arrangements, and the editorial review processes used by other journals. We all met with Beverly Guy-Sheftall, former editor of Sage, who wisely cautioned us not to promise more than we could deliver in our mission statement, especially about our global dimensions, if most of our board members were U.S.-based academics. She also cautioned us that defining thematic special issues early on before we had a steady flow of high-quality submissions, had in her experience at Sage, yielded uneven results in the caliber of work submitted on a special topic, or delayed the promised publication date of the special issue until good pieces could be recruited. Above all, she advised us to build in adequate institutional support for the editor and to publish on time.

In the spring of 1998, the editorial group made a formal written proposal to Ruth Simmons and to Doug Bennet. An integral part of the proposal was to establish a vital intellectual community and productive working climate for faculty and students of color: "Our journal would give national visibility to Smith and Wesleyan's commitments to recognize women of color in our academic mission, to recruit and retain outstanding faculty of color at both our schools, and to engage our students, through internships and conferences, with this exciting scholarship and with national and international scholars. In founding this journal and disseminating this important research, we could take a leadership role in providing the means for institutions of higher education around the country to build more inclusive curricula for the twenty-first century" (founding proposal).

In addition, our long-term goal was to "grow our own" future editors for the journal by working collectively to found the journal and learning first-hand what editing the journal entailed. The Women's Studies Program had a commitment to create a pipeline of feminist faculty of color who could join the local board as one of their primary commitments in the Program, and who could explore pre-tenure their interest and aptitude for becoming editor later in their careers. In our discussions, President Simmons was particularly eager to enhance the tenure prospects of young women of color nationwide by providing another first-rate venue for publication and to employ Meridians as well as a key element in implementing Smith's own diversity goals. Because all of the Smith faculty of color in the founding collective were untenured when we began the project, we proposed that we might initially need a visiting senior editor during the first several years of publication, but that greater stability for the journal would come from having an able pool of Smith faculty trained and willing to serve in the long-term future. The plan would also make the cost of the journal more affordable over time.

The structure we proposed included three tiers of commitment and responsibility: the highest level of commitment and responsibility would be assumed by the editorial collective, Smith and Wesleyan faculty members whose function was to set policy, review budgets, to establish criteria for board membership and for submissions, to solicit manuscripts, and to make an initial assessment of submissions in order to recommend external reviewers, and to evaluate the managing editor (founding proposal). The editorial collective nominated two editorial boards: an international advisory board and a national editorial board. The advisory board consisted of scholars, activists, and creative writers whose "leadership and contributions to feminist inquiry" had gained them national and international reputations. We asked these women to lend us their name rather than their labor: "Your presence on our masthead will signal to contributors and readers the political commitments we stand for and the level of excellence we hope to achieve" (letter of invitation to serve, April 1998).

Our nominees for the national editorial board were expected to work more closely and more intensively with us. Those who agreed to serve were asked to solicit manuscripts, to serve as peer reviewers, to nominate additional reviewers, to plan future issues, and to serve occasionally as guest editors for special issues. We also expected these editors to join us for annual board meetings during at least two of the three years they served on the board (letter of invitation to serve, April, 1998). In evaluating potential members for this "working board," we established these criteria: experience on editorial boards or as reviewers for other feminist journals; their scholarship should be interdisciplinary, by which we meant of interest and intelligible to audiences beyond their field of origin; feminist, by which we meant illuminating the experiences of women of color through an analysis of some aspect of gender as it intersected with the other key terms of our title; and original, by which we meant their writing would be desirable for publication in Meridians. We agreed that we would not privilege any one methodology, theoretical framework, or rhetorical style and that our editorial board should reflect the "fields, methodological approaches, institutional affiliations or geographical locations, and ethnic diversity the journal seeks to represent" (founding proposal). We were particularly eager to include scholars who did research in other countries and who had established networks of scholars and activists outside the U.S. Candidates were nominated by a member of the collective who knew them or their scholarship well. We compiled bibliographies for each of our nominees; two members of the collective intensively reviewed the published work of each nominee by these criteria, and reported on it to the group. In our discussion, we also considered what we knew of their collegiality and ability and willingness to mentor young scholars. Successful candidates for the editorial board were approved by all the members of the collective. Both boards were invited by President Simmons to serve for three-year renewable terms in the spring of 1998. All but a handful of our original nominees agreed to serve.

The qualities we sought in a senior editor were these: someone who shared our
vision of the inclusive, interdisciplinary, provocative journal Meridians could be; an established scholar whose interests and contacts extended beyond her own field of research and thus would enable her to solicit the range of materials we desired to publish; someone with experience on a feminist journal and familiarity with the protocols of the review process; someone who could work collaboratively with the local editorial group to realize our goals and who could follow-through independently to realize the blueprint for the journal we'd outlined in our proposals; someone with the energy and commitment to make Meridians her first priority recognizing from our own experience the labor-intensive effort of soliciting high-quality essays for a fledgling journal; someone who could give Meridians positive visibility on campus and beyond; a scholar and teacher at a point in her career who could relocate to Smith for two years; someone who could further the larger Smith goal of enabling women faculty of color to create an intellectual community with broad-ranging contacts and to participate in shaping the future of the journal.

In the summer and fall of 1999 we worked most intensively on gathering the materials for the first issue. We tested the editorial review process as we reviewed nearly 180 unsolicited manuscripts since our first call for papers in 1998, and we succeeded in meeting our goal of setting a new benchmark among academic journals for timely decisions, almost all complete within three months from submission. Our steadily expanding network of peer reviewers proved as knowledgeable and generous as we'd hoped. Reader's reports were detailed, sympathetic yet candid about needed revision, constructive in content and tone. As one contributor commented on her anonymous reviewers: “their comments represent some of the most nuanced responses I have received during the editorial process for articles submitted to a variety of journals. . .I look forward to further comments from your obviously savvy editorial board.”

Each member of the editorial group took responsibility for aggressively soliciting a stellar piece for the first issue, recognizing that the profile of the first issue would in large part shape of the issue who our subscribers and future contributors would be. We were committed to including recent graduate students as well as known authorities in a field, and all of our contributors willingly participated in several rounds of revision and wrote (and rewrote) our introduction. Each of the members of the collective read each of the pieces we considered for the first issue. Together we made the final selection, prioritized necessary revisions, designed the shape of the issue, and wrote (and rewrote) our introduction. Finally we enlisted members of our international advisory board to reflect on the key terms of our title--feminism, race, transnationalism--to chart what these terms have contributed to progressive social movements and to identify the challenges ahead for women around the world. This opening "counterpoint" highlights the central mission of Meridians to illuminate both the intersections and contradictions of these terms in the specific lives of women.

Our second national search for a senior editor in the winter of 1999-2000, once funding for the start-up phase was secure and Meridians' mission more widely known, yielded stronger candidates and a larger pool and enabled us to make a stellar appointment. Kum-Kum Bhavnani, who began a two year term as senior editor in residence at Smith College in July 2000, is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at UC, Santa Barbara, and chair of the Women, Culture and Development Program there, a program she founded with fifteen other faculty. Her contributions as researcher and teacher to the analysis of racism in feminist theory and to developing a new paradigm for development studies make her an ideal choice for the position. She brings outstanding editorial experience from her membership in the Feminist Review editorial collective, her experience as a founding and then associate editor of Feminism and Psychology, and as a guest editor for special issues of Signs. She has edited important collections on race and gender in their complex dimensions and intersections with politics, youth culture, and feminism.

Elizabeth Hanssen became managing editor (75% time) in February of 2000. For the first seven months of the Ford grant, the journal had depended on a succession of two temporary half-time staff members in this position. Ms. Hanssen's exceptional qualifications are a very good match for our needs. Having the position filled with someone of this caliber and with her long-term commitment to the journal brings much needed stability and continuity to all of the operations of the editorial office.

The depth of the institutional commitment Meridians gained even before its inaugural issue was published can be measured by the College's current capital campaign. Meridians was ranked among the highest priorities for new initiatives at the College. The campaign goal is to establish an endowment by the end of the campaign in 2003 to produce sufficient income to cover the salaries and operating expenses (exclusive of production costs met by subscription revenue) of the journal.

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