Membership Options and Dues; and Srinivas Aravamudan Prize Virtual Discussion

Dear ASECS Members,

I hope this email finds you and yours safe and healthy. The office will be closed next week and will reopen in 2022, but I had one last important update to send you before the year closes.

1) The ASECS Executive Board recently voted to adopt a new structure for membership dues. It is pasted below. This dues structure raises individual membership rates moderately, for the first time since the 2013–14 academic year. Members who make less than $75,000 will see only a $5 hike. We have also introduced more income bands to make the rates more graduated. Finally, we have added an income-based category (<$30,000) that carries the same annual rate as a student membership. We did this for two reasons. Currently, members can only receive the student rate for four years, which is less than the average time-to-degree in most PhD programs. Second, the state of the academic job market means that many recent PhDs find themselves in contingent and financially precarious positions. Under our existing dues structure, those members graduate into a slightly more expensive ASECS membership, simply because they completed their degree. This change aims to correct for that oversight.

The new rates do not take effect until the 2022–2023 year. If you have not renewed your membership yet for 2021–2022, you can still do so at the current rates (here: https://asecs.press.jhu.edu/membership/join).

2) The Society’s program featuring online discussions of the books and articles that win ASECS’ major prizes will continue, February 4th at NoonET. Register here to join us for a discussion with Rachel Wheeler (Associate Professor of Religious Studies, IUPUI) and Sarah Eyerly (Associate Professor of Musicology, Florida State), whose article, “Singing Box 331: Re-sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives,” appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly (October 2019) and received the 2021 Srinivas Aravamudan Prize. The Prize is awarded to an article published in the previous year that pushes the boundaries, geographical and conceptual, of eighteenth-century studies, especially by using a transnational, comparative, or cosmopolitan approach. Eugenia Zuroski, Associate Professor of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University, chaired last year’s Aravamudan Prize committee and will host the discussion.

Members of ASECS and its regional and affiliate societies, as well as members of ISECS-affiliated societies, are welcome to attend. The best way to access the article and all the related digital content is at https://oieahc.wm.edu/digital-projects/oi-reader/singing-box-331-rachel-wheeler-sarah-eyerly/. Create a FREE OI Reader account, and then you will be able to explore the article and get access to all the music, videos, images that accompany it. The article is available through JSTOR, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.77.3.0393.

3) Lastly, I want to remind you once more that registration is now open for the 2022 Annual Meeting in Baltimore. Visit: https://registration.socio.events/e/2022asecsmeetig. Details about the Annual Meeting and the hotel can be found at https://www.asecs2022.org/. We will be consistently updating that website with new health and safety information. Also, please remember that anyone who appears on the program must be a current member of ASCES or and ISECS-affiliate society as of January 1.

Happy New Year,

Mark

Mark Boonshoft

Executive Director

ASECS

982 Main St., Ste. 4-262

Fishkill, NY 12524