Dear SE17 members and friends,
Just a quick reminder to please renew your membership or join the Society to vote for sessions for the 2023 Rochester, NY conference. Your contribution to the ongoing work of the Society and your input regarding next year’s sessions are essential. We have therefore extended the deadline for voting another week to January 15th. You will be able to login and pay your dues or register for membership on the societal page under “SE17 Member Options.” We encourage you to take this opportunity as well to support our graduate students with a donation to the Francis Assaf Graduate Student Fund.
Following your dues payment, the link to the voting poll will also appear in the list under “SE17 Member Options.” If it does not, please refresh the page.
We also welcome your response to our short “Future directions” survey by January 15th if you have not yet registered your interests and ideas. Thank you!
Please find our January 1st New Year’s newsletter copied below with further announcements and opportunities.
Many thanks,
Anna and Katherine
Cher·e·s membres et ami·e·s de la SE17,
Juste un petit mot pour vous rappeler de renouveler votre adhésion ou d’adhérer à la Société afin de pouvoir voter pour les thèmes des sessions du colloque annuel de 2023 qui aura lieu à Rochester, NY. Votre contribution au travail de la Société et vos opinions sur le choix des sessions pour l’année prochaine sont essentielles, raison pour laquelle nous avons prolongé le délai pour voter jusqu’au 15 janvier. Vous pourrez vous inscrire et payer votre cotisation annuelle ou devenir membre sur la page de la Société, « SE17 Member Options. » Nous vous encourageons également de profiter de cette occasion pour soutenir nos doctorant·e·s en faisant un don au Francis Assaf Graduate Student Fund.
Une fois votre paiement effectué, le lien pour voter apparaîtra également sous « SE17 Member Options. » Si le lien n’apparaît pas, merci de bien vouloir recharger la page.
Vos idées et expressions d’intérêt pour les activités de la Société sont aussi les bienvenues si vous ne les avez pas encore partagées. Merci de compléter le court sondage « Futures directions » avant le 15 janvier. Merci beaucoup !
Vous trouverez également ci-dessous notre lettre du 1er janvier avec des annonces et opportunités supplémentaires.
Merci beaucoup,
Anna et Katherine
Original newsletter and invitation sent January 1:
Dear Members and Friends of the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies,
Happy New Year and warm greetings to you from the frozen lands of New England! We write with news of the Society’s activities this past year and plans for 2023, and to open voting on session topics for next year’s annual conference.
As we begin the new year, we invite you to please contribute to the work of the Society by renewing your SE17 membership or becoming a member. Your annual dues payments are crucial to the many activities of our scholarly community. They support our diversity, equity, inclusion, and access initiatives, the maintenance and development of the Early Modern France website, the publication of the Cahiers du dix-septième : An Interdisciplinary Journal, the SE17 Conference Travel Fund, and the annual conference. When you renew or join, please consider making a donation to the Francis Assaf Graduate Student Fund to support the early career scholars who are future of our discipline. We also encourage current members to take a moment to update your membership profile.
Membership for 2023 remains $25 for full time faculty and $15 for part-time faculty, independent scholars, graduate students, and retired members. You need not have a PayPal account to pay your dues. When the join-renew link takes you to PayPal, you may select the “Pay with Debit or Credit Card” button to make payment by card. Thank you in advance for your generous support of the Society and its many initiatives!
Fond memories of Reykjavík 2022
2022 marked our first in-person conference since the pandemic began, generously hosted by Toby Wikström and Juliette Cherbuliez at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík. Thanks to Toby and Juliette’s extraordinary planning, commitment, creativity, and hard work, the conference was a resounding success, both for the inspiring scholarship presented and the warm convivial atmosphere. Participants will long remember our time in beautiful Iceland, and we are immensely grateful to Toby and Juliette for all the time, energy, and attention to detail they gave to the planning and running of the conference. Many thanks also go to session and workshop chairs, our Treasurer Deborah Steinberger, our Communications Officer Emma Gauthier-Mamaril, our Webmaster Tad Macy, and to the University of Iceland and the University of Minnesota, among other sponsors, for their generous support of the conference.
Announcing the 2023 Annual Conference
We are delighted to announce that our 42nd Annual Conference will be held at the University of Rochester, 19-21 October 2023, hosted by Anna Rosensweig. Located in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State, Rochester has a rich cultural and political history. It is situated on ancestral land of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and during the nineteenth century it was a center for the abolitionist and Women’s Suffrage movements. Rochester is an ideal site from which to continue our society’s conversations about the global contexts of our work on early modern France and “new France.” Please look for the call for papers in early February. Looking ahead, we are also pleased to confirm that our 2024 conference will take place in Chicago, IL, hosted by Ellen McClure and Larry Norman.
Voting on sessions for the Rochester conference
Voting on session topics for the Rochester conference will begin on January 1 and run through January 9, 2023. As is our procedure, SE17 members present at the Reykjavík conference nominated a series of session topics for consideration. In order to vote on sessions, your membership dues must be paid for the 2023 calendar year. Once you have renewed your membership or joined the Society, you will be able to vote on sessions through the link under “SE17 Member Options” on the societal page.
Many thanks to outgoing Executive Committee members
As we transition from 2022 to 2023, we want to thank several outgoing members of our Executive Committee and welcome two new members. Great thanks go to Heather Kirk for her important contributions and insights as a Member-at-large over these past three years, and to Anne Duprat and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys for their constant commitment to the work of the Society, first as conference Presidents and then Past Presidents these last two years. We thank Anna Rosensweig, who is finishing a three-year term as Member-at-large, for her extraordinary generosity in taking up the charge of President for the year ahead and organizing our 2023 conference. We are thrilled to welcome to the committee for a three-year term, newly elected Members-at-large Louise Moulin and Joy Palacios. The Executive Committee met in late December with both outgoing and incoming members, and we look forward to another exciting year ahead.
The Executive Committee would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Jean-Vincent Blanchard for his years of tireless service as Editor of the Cahiers du dix-septième since his election to the position at Mills College in 2017. Jean-Vincent will be concluding his tenure as Editor with a final volume in spring 2023. We cannot thank him enough, not only for his hard work and devotion to the journal during his time as Editor, but also for his always valuable perspectives and profound commitment to the work of the Society during his many years as a member of the Executive Committee.
Great gratitude goes as well to the entire Executive Committee for their work over the past year. We are always moved by the extraordinary care, careful thinking, and constant devotion that our members bring to making the SE17 the Society we all cherish.
Ongoing IDEA Initiatives (inclusion, diversity, equity, access)
The Society continued its work this year toward greater inclusion, diversity, equity, and access, as resolved by the Executive Committee in 2020, under the leadership of IDEA Officers Ashley Williard and Jennifer Row and IDEA Committee members. In accordance with our action plan, our annual conference included again this year several presentations addressing IDEA-related questions, as well as designated plenary panels on “Teaching the Seventeenth Century to Diverse Student Bodies” and “Indigenous and First Nations Peoples.” We warmly welcomed several graduate students to their first SE17 and awarded a record eight travel grants to assist scholars of all career stages in attending the conference. Thanks to Toby and Juliette’s efforts, we continued to experiment with the inclusion of hybrid sessions and closed captioning to facilitate greater conference accessibility.
As part of our fall “future directions” survey (the second of the two surveys sent out following the Reykjavík conference), we solicited member ideas and interest regarding mentoring and professional development workshop initiatives that we hope to introduce in the coming year. We also plan to continue our collective learning and collaboration through reading groups on race in the early modern world as well as disability studies. The early modern race group, led by Valentina Denzel and Ashley Williard, will begin meeting again this month (announcement to follow). Thank you to all who already expressed interest in participating in these and other Society activities by completing the survey in November. If you did not complete the very short survey then, please take a moment to do so now. We would appreciate a response by January 15th. Please also complete the survey if you are interested in finding out more about possibly getting involved as a contributing editor to Early Modern France website or taking on an editorial role as part of a Cahiers du dix-septième: An Interdisciplinary Journal team. We are eager to hear from you about your interest in any of these opportunities and your ideas for future initiatives.
We also hope you’ll contribute to our ongoing list of “Resources for anti-racist scholarship and teaching in Early Modern French Studies” by submitting references or links to primary and secondary sources, websites, media, conferences, and other projects (you will find the simple submission form at the bottom of the linked page).
Reminder of Call for Graduate Prize Submissions and Prize Announcement
Graduate students and post-docs are warmly invited to submit their 20-minute conference papers, presented at this year’s Reykjavík conference. Those who presented in “non-traditional” (shorter form) sessions are invited to expand their contribution to conference-paper length for submission. All submissions should be approximately 10-pages (double-spaced), not including notes and bibliography. MLA style or Chicago style documentation preferred. Please send submissions for consideration to Prize Committee Chair, Abby Zanger, by January 15, 2023.
We will also be moving ahead this year with a new prize to promote scholarship that “relativizes, problematizes, and revitalizes aspects of the French and Francophone culture of the 17th century that have been under recognized by and in the established critical canon of French 17th-century studies. Subjects treated include, but are not limited to, the following topics: disability, race, non-normative sexuality, queer theory/studies, global topics, any area of francophone studies (North Africa, Caribbean, North America, Asia).” Many thanks to Prize Committee Chair Abby Zanger, as well as to Ellen McClure, for their work on this initiative. Please stay tuned for further details regarding the prize competition criteria and process.
Announce your news via the website and social media
We encourage you to send your announcements and resource suggestions to the Early Modern France website using this form. Follow us on social media as well to stay in tune with news regarding the Society (new publications from members, calls for papers, information on the next conference, etc.). Let’s continue to create a sense of community and connection thanks to the virtual world. Please don’t forget to share your publications with our accounts on the following platforms :
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Twitter : https://twitter.com/SE17_officiel
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Instagram (new!) : https://www.instagram.com/se17.officiel/
Finally, we would like to invite and encourage you once again to renew your membership for 2023 today, or to join the Society if you are not yet a member, and to please consider making a donation to the Francis Assaf Graduate Student Fund.
On behalf of the SE17 Executive Committee, we wish you all the very best for the New Year!
Katherine Dauge-Roth
SE17 Executive Director
Anna Rosensweig
SE17 President