Introduction:Scholarship across the Aisle (Establishing Meaningful Scholarly Relationships Outside of One's Linguistic/Cultural Tradition)1 Logan J. Connors (bio) and Jason H. Pearl (bio) It has been fifteen years since The Global Eighteenth Century—a landmark collection of essays, edited by Felicity Nussbaum—called on specialists in the long eighteenth century to consider as their purview a "wide" eighteenth century, one that stretched across national and natural borders to the Earth's farthest corners.2 Many have heeded the call, transforming the way we think about everything from the history of science to literary history. And yet much of this work is confined to a single imperial power and its colonies. Much of it is focused on a single linguistic or cultural tradition. Much is addressed to members of a single discipline. Much, in other words, remains to be done. We can start with our major conference, the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), where panels on British literature outnumber all other fields combined—a problem invisible to most British literature specialists but obvious to everyone else. Entire disciplines and subdisciplines are absent or troublingly underrepresented. At several of the "ASECS at 50" Presidential Sessions at the 2019 meeting in Denver participants wondered: where are the historians? The economists? The political theorists? Where are the specialists in eastern Europe? Of Asia [End Page 25] and South America? And this is to say nothing of the racial and cultural diversity of the participants themselves. Whatever their field, regular participants at ASECS go to similar panels year after year, interacting with the same colleagues, ensconcing themselves from everyone else to talk about research on the same places, authors, and texts. This type of scholarship will always receive support from ASECS, and it probably should. Yet the Society and its members can and should do more to bring underrepresented scholars into the fold and to catalyze broader interdisciplinary conversations across its ranks. That is why we proposed, for the 2019 meeting, the roundtable, "Scholarship across the Aisle: Establishing Meaningful Scholarly Relationships Outside of One's Linguistic/Cultural Tradition," an attempt to reflect on disciplinary divides and posit new methods for crossing them. In our call for papers, we asked, "What can we do to make ASECS more welcoming to people working in areas outside British literature? What can we do to facilitate more interaction among scholars of different fields? What would it take for us to work beyond those boundaries and create meaningful interactions that would allow us to learn more from each other?" At a time when the humanities are under siege—under threat from even universities themselves—we need to support smaller disciplines most at risk, from French and German to Dance and Music. One of the ways to do this is to imagine and establish new opportunities for dialogue based on topics that transcend the specializations in which we feel the most comfortable. What emerged from the roundtable was a conversation about not only eighteenth-century places (England, France, Italy, Russia, North America, the Caribbean, and more) but also the place of eighteenth-century scholars. We need to enable scholars from outside the usual Europe-North America axis to engage with ASECS. A litany of new questions ensues: what structures—ideological, financial, and linguistic—enable the continuation of the Anglo-ASECS paradigm? What can ASECS do to encourage scholars from the global south, geographically distant nations, and other underrepresented zones to attend its annual meeting, regional conferences, and other programs? How can new technologies help to create a more robust intellectual network of eighteenth-century studies around the globe? These questions demand research, resources, and commitment. We hope that the cluster of essays here is a helpful step towards democratizing and decolonizing the tools and opportunities that help eighteenth-century scholars research, collaborate, publish, and teach. Participants in the roundtable spoke about the content of eighteenth-century studies—what we study and why—as well as the formal norms of scholarship and scholarly communication. If several subdisciplines lack a [End Page 26] critical mass of scholars for a stand-alone panel on Russian folk singing, Japanese painting, or French rural policy, what other...