Our friendship and collaboration began with an invitation to coedit an issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly; we thank Cindi Katz and Nancy K. Miller for their intellectual matchmaking that brought us together. From tentative long-distance telephone calls between two strangers, in which we searched for shared sympathies and interests, the theme of the global and the intimate emerged. Our pleasure working together on the WSQ volume and our enthusiasm for the topic led to this second project, organized around the same theme; we are grateful to Gloria Jacobs for permission to reprint some essays here. We thank Jennifer Gieseking for arranging our first meeting at Mount Holyoke College in 2007, where we copresented introductory remarks at the Global and the Intimate conference and developed preliminary thoughts toward this volume and our introduction to it. We thank Rachel Adams for reading a first draft of the introduction and our anonymous referees for their helpful critical comments on the introduction and the manuscript as a whole. Thanks also to our series editor, Nancy K. Miller (once more!). Columbia University Press has provided a wonderful editorial home for this work; we are especially grateful to Jennifer Crewe. Our beautiful cover image appears courtesy of the artist, Mirta Kupferminc. Bonnie Kaserman and Sarah Zell helped us in preparing the manuscript, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council provided financial support.