Acknowledgments
Editing, like writing, can be a lonely process, and I am immensely grateful to everyone who made it less so, above all to Alexandre Duchêne and Pia Lane, who initially joined me as coeditors on this project and took part in the drafting of the book proposal and the process of peer review. I deeply regret the fact that both decided to step down for personal reasons. A major inspiration behind this project was the workshop on the history of ideas on multilingualism organized by Alexandre Duchêne and Raphael Berthele in November 2014 in Fribourg, and I am thankful to both of them for the intellectually stimulating conversations we had. I am also grateful to the Center for Multilingualism at the University of Oslo for supporting the round table on “Multilingual practices from antiquity to the present day,” co-organized by Pia Lane and myself, which brought (nearly) all of the contributors together for exciting discussions in April 2019.
To maintain academic rigor we relied on numerous academic colleagues around the world who generously donated their time and expertise to one of the most crucial yet least visible and appreciated academic tasks – peer review. For their prompt and insightful feedback on individual chapters, thank you to all the contributors who doubled as internal reviewers and to a stellar group of external reviewers: Constanze Ackermann-Boström (Umeå University), Frederick Anscombe (Birkbeck College, University of London), Cyril Aslanov (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Mark Bai Li (University of Oxford), Elisabeth Barakos (University of Hamburg), James Clackson (University of Cambridge), Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre (University of Murcia), James Costa (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Martin Durrell (University of Manchester), Halvor Eifring (University of Oslo), Robert Evans (University of Oxford), Hilary Footitt (University of Reading), Victor Friedman (University of Chicago), Michael Gorham (University of Florida), Madoka Hammine (Meio University), Monica Heller (University of Toronto), Francis Hult (University of Maryland), Olesya Khanina (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences), Nils Langer (University of Flensburg), Li Wei (Institute of Education, University College London), Pedro Mantes España (University of Cordoba), Hannah McElgunn (University of British Columbia), Laura Morreale (Georgetown University), Maya Muratov (New York University), Kari Aga Myklebost (the Arctic University of Norway), Jan Henrik Nilsson (Lund University), Aleksandra Oszmiańska-Pagett (Wyższa Szkoła Języków Obcych, Poznań) Arietta Papaconstantinou (University of Reading), Christine Philiou (University of California, Berkeley), David Porter (Yale University), Denys Pringle (Cardiff University), Vladislav Rjéoutski (German Historical Institute, Moscow), Lara Ryazanova-Clarke (University of Edinburgh), Karène Sanchez Summerer (Leiden University), Yuri Slezkine (University of California, Berkeley), Bernardino Cardoso Tavares (University of Luxembourg), Jacob Thaisen (University of Oslo), Sofia Torallas Tovar (University of Chicago), Nikolai Vakhtin (European University at St. Petersburg), Wim Vandenbussche (Vrije University, Brussels), Estelle Ingrand Varenne (University of Poitiers), Marja Vierros (University of Helsinki), Greg Woolf (University of California, Los Angeles), and Xinqiu Guan (Old Dominion University).
A virtual collaboration throughout the COVID pandemic, a contested US election, and, in the last weeks of this project, a devastating war in my homeland has been an unsettling and sometimes surreal experience. I am all the more grateful to the contributors for their willingness to undergo the intense editing process, the patience with which they responded to my endless queries, and the warmth of the exchanges on topics that had nothing to do with this volume. It was a pleasure and an honor to work with such an outstanding group of scholars and human beings.
