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  • Editorial
  • Nicole Pohl

This Festschrift is in honor of Lyman Tower Sargent, the founder of this journal and the foremost bibliographer of and scholar on utopias and utopianism. Festschriften are curious beasts, honoring scholars and writers at different points of their careers. Though Sargent only recently celebrated his eightieth birthday, all of us who know him well recognize that he will continue writing, thinking, and breathing utopias and utopianism. But more so, as some of the personal reflections echo, Sargent has been and is unique in his nurturing of young scholars and practitioners—nurturing in terms of scholarship, advice and criticism, regular e-mail missives with new reading, and also the occasional rich (and very expensive) red wine (and, speaking for myself, home-baked muffins and discussions about music and noise).

This Festschrift is a blend of bibliographies, personal reflections, and implicit/explicit engagement with Sargent's foundational work, and the sections are divided up accordingly. It starts with brief introductions from the current presidents of the two societies dedicated to utopian studies, Peter Sands of the Society for Utopian Studies and Gregory Claeys of the Utopian Studies Society. What follows are more personal reflections of a few friends [End Page 235] and scholars and then more scholarly engagements with Sargent's work, and the volume finishes with a bibliography of Sargent's extensive work and a bibliography of work on intentional communities. (Sargent, of course, has also been involved in the work of the Communal Studies Association and the International Communal Studies Association for a long time.) The voices we hear are a mere selection that we were forced to make—we could have chosen many more contributions from friends and collaborators. Nevertheless, these testimonies are representative of the debt all of us owe to Sargent as a scholar, teacher, and friend.


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Figure 1.

Lyman Tower Sargent at the annual conference of the Society for Utopian Studies in Montreal, 2014.

In his brief refection on the genre of the Festschrift, Klingbeil suggests that "Festschriften may actually be a helpful way of linking those who are inside the circle to those who are standing outside of it."1 There are not many "outside of the circle," thanks to the generosity and cordiality of Sargent. We hope that this Festschrift will not only honor Sargent but also reflect the extensive range of his interests and, indeed, the wide inter- and transdisciplinary nature of utopian studies. [End Page 236]

Note

1. Gerald A. Klingbeil, "'Inside and Outside the Circle': What Does the Festschrift Genre Tell About Our Discipline?" Society of Biblical Literature, 2020, https://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?ArticleId=861.

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