Dear members of the New England and Eastern Canada Region of the SBL,
Huge thanks to all of you – session chairs, participants, panelists, and audience members – who contributed to making our 2011 meeting a fantastic, stimulating, and all-around enjoyable experience!
Special thanks to Susan Ackerman and Francois Bovon for really interesting, thorough, and thought-provoking plenary and presidential addresses. According to all the feedback I received, both were definite highlights of the meeting, along with the grad student lunch panel organized by Chris Stroup, with presentations on the topic of “Finding Your ‘Voice’ In Biblical Studies” by Adela Yarbro Collins, Kent Richards, and Larry Wills.
Many many thanks go to my hard-working committee for their help and support in making the program so stimulating and exciting. They were: Francois Bovon, Harvard Divinity School, regional president; Jennifer Knust of Boston University, committee Chair; David Bernat of Hebrew College and Wellesley; David Eastman of Yale University; Julie Faith Parker of Colby College; Amelia Devin Freedman of U Mass Lowell; and Christopher Stroup of Boston University, who is also our talented and very appreciated webmaster. We will miss David Eastman as he moves on to bigger and brighter horizons – unfortunately in another region. David’s spot on the executive committee has been taken by Yonder Gillihan of Boston College, and we are all excited to begin working with him in planning our 2012 meeting.
On behalf of the committee, in addition to our thanks for a great year, we are also saying a fond farewell to Francois Bovon as Regional President, as we also welcome Harold Attridge of Yale University to this position for the 2012 year and very much look forward to working with him.
As we begin to plan our next meeting for April 27, 2012 at Andover-Newton – who so graciously have been hosting us free of charge for many years now – we would like to hear from you, our members, with your ideas about how we might improve the meeting and make it even more beneficial for all of us. To this end, we have prepared a survey that we would greatly appreciate your taking the time to fill out. If there’s more that you want to say than is accommodated by the survey format, as always I welcome your feedback and suggestions – please contact me at dr.shawna@gmail.com with your ideas.
We’ll have the Call for Papers prepared and up on this site sometime in December. In the meantime, I hope you all have a wonderfully restful and productive summer!
Shawna
Shawn Lisa Dolansky, Ph.D.
Adjunct Instructor and Research Fellow at the College of the Humanities
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
