I edit Contagion, the journal of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion now published at Michigan State University Press. The journal and its membership are international as well as interdisciplinary. Although we publish only in English, in the last two years I have read work in Italian, Danish, French, and German by theologians, anthropologists, classicists, scholars in philosophy, scholars in biblical and Hebraic studies, professors of modern languages, and one billionaire.
It is a bit of a stretch for an English professor. Yet editing Contagion seems to follow naturally from graduate school, research, and teaching: faculty in modern languages have always spent their lives working up other disciplines as they became necessary, and of course studying languages. Digitalization has of course increased the pace of self-study and altered its circumstances. What excuse is left for not knowing everything?
Submissions to Contagion are by preference electronic; sometimes just opening a second search window to educate myself is enough to keep reading, and to know at the end who to ask to review the submission. And perhaps a professor of the "mother tongue" can best encourage an author whose first language is not English that a contribution is accessible, free of howlers.
William A. Johnsen, Contagion
