Central European History Society
Newsletter
Winter 2012
The annual AHA conference in Chicago (January 5-8) was indeed memorable for our fifty-three year organization. With Helmut Walser Smith presiding at the annual Business Meeting, the membership voted to rename the Conference Group for Central European History. We are now the Central European History Society (CEHS). We believe this name is a more transparent label of who we are and what we do. Over the past twenty years, the Society had become much more than a mere conference affiliate of the AHA, and the new name simply denotes the organization that the CEHS had become. Please spread the word!
The Business Meeting’s other major news was Ken Ledford’s announcement that he would not serve beyond his second five-year term as Editor of Central European History. His term ends in June 2014. Consequently, the Board proposed a procedure for conducting a search, which the members approved. A Search Committee (consisting of CEHS’s outgoing president Helmut Smith, current president Jamie Melton, vice-president David Sabean, and vice-president elect Celia Applegate) will put out a call for a new Editor on list-serves, the CEHS website, the Cambridge Journals website, and in various journals. (See the call on the Home Page of the CEHS website.) Candidates for the job should submit their materials by June 1, 2012. The Committee will review dossiers and interview a short list of candidate at the German Studies Association in October 2012. This committee will make a recommendation to the Executive Board, which will bring the matter before members at its annual meeting in January 2013. Jim Brophy, the current Secretary-Treasurer, will also be stepping down in January 2013 AHA, and the membership passed a resolution to replace him.
Winners of the annual Hans Rosenberg Book Prize and the biannual Hans Rosenberg Article Prize were fêted. Mary Lindemann, a member of the Book Prize Committee, read the laudatio for Monica Black’s Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge UP, 2010); and Helmut Smith read the laudatio for Jonathan Zatlin’s article, “Unifying without Integrating: The East German Collapse and German Unity,” which appeared in Central European History 43 (2010), pp. 487-507. The Society extends its sincerest congratulations to professors Black and Zatlin. Please see the CEHS website for the texts of the laudations, and the Society sincerely thanks the prize committee members for their hard work. (Book Prize Committee: Mary Jo Maynes, Chair, Mary Lindemann, and Edward Dickinson; and the Article Prize Committee: Hilary Earl, Chair, Caitlin Murdoch, and Jared Poley.)
The Business Meeting then turned to its annual reports. The Editor reported that the journal was in fine shape. In the last year the number of submitted articles rose dramatically, and the Editor noted that the quality of submissions to be as high as ever. The reports of the Secretary-Treasurer were also good. Similar to last year, the Society is left with a balance of $99,046.60 at the end of 2011, allowing the members to approve a one-time additional sum of $10,000 to the Endowment Fund. Jamie Melton, the CEHS president for 2012, reported on the Society’s fourth annual Research Grants competition, whose winner will be announced in March 2012. The submissions are as robust as last year, suggesting that the grants competition has taken firm root in graduate student culture. Finally, Joseph Patrouch also provided a report on the Austrian and Habsburg History Society, a report that encouraged greater collaboration between Habsburgists and German historians.
Finally, the members voted on and approved the Executive Board’s two incoming members: Celia Applegate as vice-president elect; and Maureen Healy as Member at Large. We look forward to working with the two new board members, and we simultaneously thank the outgoing officers, Gary Cohen and Lisa Heineman, for their hard work and good counsel.
With business concluded, the meeting moved on to the Bierabend, which was well attended and particularly lively this year. We thank members of the CEHS for attending our six CEHS organized panels at the conference as well as our Business Meeting and Bierabend, and we hope to see you in New Orleans next year.
With best wishes,
Jim Brophy
Secretary-Treasurer, CEHS