Archived Presidential Letters

September 24, 2007

Dear MAP members,

I write on behalf of the MAP officers and Council members to ask you to renew your membership for the 2007-08 academic year. We thank those of you who renew your dues faithfully every year. Your loyalty is a great service to the profession.

Membership renewal forms, available at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/MAP/Documents/memberform.pdf should be mailed to our treasurer:

Professor John Ott
Department of History
Portland State University
Portland, OR 97207-0751

Membership in MAP is one of the last great bargains: $25 (both US and Canadian) per year for regular membership and $15 per year for students.

MAP s main expenditures each year relate to the annual conference and support for graduate students. We provide Benton Travel Awards to members who do not have institutional support for travel to conferences, and we award up to three Founders Prizes for high quality graduate student papers presented at our annual conference. We also subsidize graduate student attendance at our annual meetings by paying their registration fees for them. Many people attest that the opportunity to present a paper at an annual MAP meeting is the greatest service we provide for our graduate students.

Alas our memberships have declined over the last few years. Believing that many who did not renew their dues last year did not actually intend to drop membership in MAP, the MAP officers are working to improve communication with members and to make the process of membership renewal easier and more transparent. Our webmaster and soon-to-be Secretary of MAP, Scott Kleinman, is working on creating a system that will allow members and former members to check their membership status by visiting our web site. In the meantime, I ask you to renew for 2007-08 immediately, and if you think you might not have renewed last year, consider sending past dues and/or a gift to MAP to support our Founders Prize or Benton Award.

On a more cheerful note, I am happy to report that many medievalists in the MAP region have submitted excellent proposals for the next MAP conference, a meeting with Medieval Academy of America, which will be hosted by University of British Columbia in Vancouver, April 3-5, 2008. Warm thanks to Sibn Echard and Richard Unger for their leadership.

The conference will feature three plenary speakers: Chris Wickham, Cichele Professor of Medieval History, All Souls College, Oxford, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, English, University of York, and Bernard McGinn, Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and of the History of Christianity in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and President of the Academy. There will also be a plenary CARA session, in which panelists will discuss the idea of "medieval" in the Asian context. The program for the conference will be available on the MAA and MAP websites by the end of the year.

I will close by asking you to make sure new faculty at your school know about MAP and to remind graduate students working on medieval topics that MAP subsidizes student registration fees for our annual meetings (even when we meet with MAA), and that MAP funds the John F. Benton Travel Awards and the Founders' Prizes. The deadline for the next round of applications for the Benton Travel Awards is November 1.

I look forward to seeing many of you in Vancouver in April 2008, and I hope to be able to report at that time that our membership is more robust. In the meantime, do continue to check in with the website (http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/MAP/) to keep abreast of MAP's activities.

Sincerely,

Phyllis Brown
President, Medieval Association of the Pacific