Conference Group for Central European History
Newsletter
Fall 2007

Dear Colleagues,
The Conference Group's  business meeting and Bierabend will take place Saturday, January 5, 2008 at the American Historical Association convention in Washington D.C. This year both the business meeting and Bierabend will be held at the German Historical Institute (1607 New Hampshire Ave, NW. Exit at Metrorail’s Dupont Circle Station; call the GHI at 202-387-3355 for additional details). Many thanks to the GHI for co-sponsoring the Bierabend with us this year. The business meeting will convene at 5:30 at the GHI. The Bierabend begins at 6:30.
*Important*! All members should make an effort to be present at this year’s business meeting for a discussion and vote on the Conference Group’s current draft spending plan. The plan is available as a link from the first page of the Conference Group’s website and is also printed below. Please read through the plan and come ready to discuss and vote on the future financial direction and future programs of the Conference Group. Further business includes the nomination of new members of the Executive Committee and the announcement of the biennial Hans Rosenberg Article Prize. The Conference Group is sponsoring 14 sessions at the AHA meeting in 2008. Information about the sessions is included below.
Jennifer Jenkins

Contents


  1. 2008 AHA meeting
         CGCEH sessions at the AHA

  2. Conference Group for Central European History
         Current Officers
         Nominations for Representatives to the Board of Friends of the GHI
         CGCEH Draft Spending Plan      
  3.              
    Announcements
         Hans Rosenberg Book Prize Winner 2006
         Central European History online renewal information
         Opportunity to make a tax exempt donation to the Conference Group's   
         Endowment Fund
1. 2008 AHA meeting

Conference Group for Central European History at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
2008 Annual Meeting, Washington D.C.

Thursday, January 3

  • 3:00–5:00 p.m. Marriott, Washington Room 2. Session 1, joint with the AHA. The Intellectual Origins of German Colonial Studies: Interdisciplinary and Transnational Dimensions of an Emerging Research Agenda, panel # 11

 

Friday, January 4

  • 9:30–11:30 a.m. Marriott, Maryland Suite A. Session 2, joint with the AHA and the German Historical Institute. Rivers of History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America, panel #52
  • 9:30–11:30 a.m. Marriott, Roosevelt Room. Session 3. The Vatican-National Socialist Relationship Re-examined: New Historiography, New Evidence
  • 9:30–11:30 a.m. Marriott, Kennedy Room. Session 4. Anti-Semitism: European Roots and International Diffusion in the Twentieth Century
  • 2:30–4:30 p.m. Marriott, Harding Room. Session 5, joint with the AHA and the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History. Sexual Deviation and Social Control in Late Imperial Eastern Europe, panel #66
  • 2:30–4:30 p.m. Omni, Hampton Ballroom. Session 6, joint with the AHA. Europe Meets Asia—Experience and Knowledge between Two Worlds, panel # 80
  • 2:30–4:30 p.m. Marriott, Lanai Room 148. Session 7. The Appeal of the German University Ideal in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America: Critical Transatlantic Perspectives

 

Saturday, January 5

  • 11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.  Marriott, Eisenhower Room. Session 8. Thinking outside the Bismarckian Box: New Approaches to the History of the German Welfare State
  • 2:30–4:30 p.m.  Hilton, Georgetown West. Session 9, joint with the AHA and the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History. Eastern Europe: Myths of Uneven Development, panel # 157
  • 5:30–6:30 p.m. German Historical Institute, 1607 New Hampshire Ave. N.W. Business meeting. Exit at Metrorail’s Dupont Circle Station; call 202–387–3355 for additional details.
  • 6:30–8:30 p.m. German Historical Institute. Bierabend, cosponsored with the German Historical Institute

 

Sunday, January 6

  • 8:30–10:30 a.m. Marriott, Delaware Suite A. Session 10, joint with the AHA. Contested Sites of Modernism in Twentieth-Century Germany: The Political and Social Impact of Music Festivals, panel #183
  • 8:30–10:30 a.m. Omni, Congressional Room A. Session 11, joint with the AHA and the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History. Populations, Politics, Violence: East-Central European Cities 1914–19, panel #186
  • 8:30–10:30 a.m. Marriott, Taft Room. Session 12. Becoming Modern: Rethinking the Intellectual History of Weimar Germany
  • 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. Omni, Congressional Room B. Session 13, joint with the AHA. “The Wall in the Head”: Making East and West on the German-German Border, 1949–89, panel #216
  • 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.  Marriott, Taft Room. Session 14. Conflict and Compromise between Church and State in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany and the German Democratic Republic from 1945 to 1989
2. Conference Group for Central European History Current Officers


President: Isabel Hull, Cornell University
Vice-President: Anthony La Vopa, North Carolina State University
Vice-President Elect: Ann Goldberg, University of California, Riverside
Immediate Past President: Ron Smelser, University of Utah
At-Large Member: Nancy Wingfield, Northern Illinois University
At-Large Member: Richard Wetzell, GHI
At-Large Member: Scott Spector, University of Michigan

Editor of Central European History: Kenneth Ledford, Case Western Reserve University
Administrator and Treasurer, Jennifer Jenkins, University of Toronto

Nominations for Representatives to the Board of Friends of the GHI


The Executive Committee is soliciting recommendations for two members of the Conference Group to serve on the board of Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. (FGHI).  Our two delegates, Roger Chickering and David Blackbourn, have served long and well, and the Conference Group thanks them for their service. Preferably, the nominee will reside in the Washington, D.C. area to facilitate attendance of board meetings.  Interested members please contact the Executive Secretary. This issue will be discussed at the January executive committee and business meetings. 


CGCEH Draft Spending Plan     


The following plan is a draft. It is meant to spur discussion. Please read through and send your comments/thoughts/criticisms and ideas to Jennifer Jenkins, the Conference Group’s Executive Secretary, at jl.jenkins@utoronto.ca This plan will be voted on by all attending members at the CGCEH Business Meeting on January 5, 2008. Please make every effort to attend.

CONFERENCE GROUP SPENDING PLAN

Basic Assumption

As a conservative estimate, the Conference Group can count on about $20-25,000 per year from its contract with Cambridge University Press.  Of that fund, $5,000 – 10,000 should cover current expenditures, leaving $15,000 to be spent in new ways. 

Spending Categories

This plan would put proposed spending into four categories: (1) increase the Conference Group endowment; (2) increase the amounts for the book and article prizes; (3) institute summer travel grants for graduate students and new Ph.D.s; (4) institute travel to conference grants—for the annual AHA and GSA meetings—for graduate students presenting papers.

Endowment Spending

The plan would propose to invest $5,000 each year in the Conference Group’s endowment.  Added to the $22,000 in the endowment currently, and assuming an annual 4% rate of return (a cautious estimate), this would give, after five years, an endowment of approximately $55,000.  At the standard 5% yearly payout ratio for endowments, the Conference Group would be guaranteed an annual, income of $2,750 in perpetuity.

Improving the Book and Article Prizes

Currently, the conference group awards a book prize of $700 and an article prize of $500 every other year.  It would be desirable to make both these prizes yearly ones, and to increase the amount of the book prize to $1000.  To do this, would require and additional expenditure of $650 per year for the book prize and $250 per year for the article prize, making a total of an additional $900 per year to be spent on the prizes.

Research/Travel Grants

Two $4,000 research travel grants awarded each year would cost $8,000. These grants would be for graduate student ABDs or individuals who had received their PhD in the previous five years. Eligible individuals would have to be US or Canadian citizens or permanent residents, or students enrolled in a graduate program at a North American university or faculty members employed at a North American university, and paid-up members of the Conference Group. 

Travel to Conference Grants

Two travel to conference grants in the amount of $600 each, totaling $1,200, would be awarded to graduate students currently enrolled in North American universities who would be presenting papers at the annual meetings of the GSA or the AHA, or other scholarly conference in North America—the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association or the Conference of Europeanists, for example.  To be eligible for these grants, applicants would have to be members of the Conference Group.

Recapitulation

Building the endowment: $5,000
Improving the prize awards: $900
Research-travel grants: 2 @ $4,000 each, or $8,000
Travel to conference grants: 2 @ $700 each, or $1,400
Total: $15,300.

Observations

At the end of five years, the annual endowment return of $2,750 would fund the book prize of $1,000 and the article prize of $500, leaving about $1,250.  This would fund most of the travel to conference grants.  The funds out of current income being used in the previous years to pay for these expenditures could be used for other purposes.  Of course, the Conference Group’s publishing contract with Cambridge University Press would then be up, and it might then be necessary to reconsider financial arrangements.  Even in the worst of all possible worlds, though, the enhanced endowment would remain and could pay for at least some of the Conference Group expenditures.

These figures are extremely cautious and conservative estimates.  Cambridge University Press, for instance, is projecting that by 2010 the Conference Group’s annual income from Central European History should be on the order of $40,000 per year.  Should additional funds become available, I would suggest four possibilities for their use:

  1. Increase and accelerate the funding of the Conference Group’s endowment.
  2. Add one extra research grant and two more travel to conference grants to our program.
  3. Conduct a modest advertising campaign—perhaps by using the GSA mailing list—to inform people about the new grant program and the enhanced prizes.  Ken Ledford has suggested that such a campaign could also include a pitch to subscribe to the journal.  Since there would now be some potential benefits from being a Conference Group member and journal subscriber, this might help to increase individual journal subscriptions.
  4. Improve the quality of food at the annual Conference Group Bierabend.  Doing this might encourage better attendance, perhaps even to the business meeting, as well.

 

Jonathan Sperber
Revised 3/30/07

3. Announcements
    

Hans Rosenberg Book Prize Winner 2006


The Conference Group is proud to announce the winner of the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize for 2006. The winning book, chosen out of a pool of over 50 books published in 2004 and 2005, is John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Many congratulations to Professor Toews on the winning of the prize and many thanks to the Prize Committee for their service.

Statement from the Book Prize Committee:
“The winner of the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize for a work published in any field of Central European History in 2004 and 2005 is Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin by John Edward Toews, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.  In this sweeping work of intellectual history, Toews explores the rich historicist culture of Berlin leading up to the 1840s, its sources, contexts, and its manifestations in diverse disciplines of philosophy, literature, political thought, music, and architecture.  In doing so, Becoming Historical offers a unique interpretation of the emergence of historicist consciousness and nationalism out of the strains of Romanticism, post-Kantian philosophy, and Protestant ethics, and models the contradictions and paradoxes of historical subjectivity.  Methodologically it deepens textual and contextual practices of intellectual history, venturing to reconstruct how contemporary subjects experienced the compositions and spaces of historicist culture.  This book was selected out of a pool of over 50 historical works published in 2004 and 2005.  The committee congratulates  Professor Toews and thanks him for this impressive work.”

Scott Spector, Ann Goldberg and Robert Moeller
December 2006


Central European History online renewal information


Online renewal is available. Please go to http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=CCC


Opportunity to make a tax exempt donation to the Conference Group's Endowment Fund


With the acquisition of tax exempt status, the Conference Group is in a position to start building up its small endowment.  As regular readers of the Newsletter already know, the Conference Group's capital fund at the beginning of the year was about $25,000.  There were some one-time expenses this past year, which resulted in a reduction to around $20,000.  While the new tax exemption has made it possible to invest this capital in a Certificate of Deposit, the interest income will help the fund grow only slowly.  Our aim is to fund the Hans Rosenberg book and article prizes in perpetuity from the return on capital.  The executive board therefore welcomes any and all donations that would help increase our endowment fund.  Interested members and well-wishers please contact Jennifer Jenkins, the Executive Secretary/Treasurer, for details (email: jl.jenkins@utoronto.ca).
If you have questions or comments about this newsletter, please contact Jennifer Jenkins, Executive Secretary of the Conference Group, at jl.jenkins@utoronto.ca

 

 

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