Letter from the President

Dear SESAH members and friends,

These are confusing, hectic, but strangely quiet times. All our lives have been affected in important ways in the last month by the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of us are having to learn new digital strategies for doing our work remotely. Several national architectural history conferences scheduled for April and May, including SAH’s Seattle conference, have been cancelled or shifted to a virtual format.

Annual Meeting in Natchez

We want to assure you that the SESAH board is closely watching the situation regarding our own annual meeting. We don’t know for sure what the landscape will look like in the coming months, but for now we expect and hope that by this fall the virus will be better understood and controlled and that travel restrictions will have been lifted. Toward that end, we will continue to plan for our annual meeting to be held in Natchez, Mississippi, September 30-October 3, 2020 by reviewing paper abstracts and award nominations in the coming months. We have, however, extended the deadline for the Call for Papers to May 15 to allow you more time to prepare your paper abstracts, and our Papers Committee will respond to potential presenters by June 8. We hope this extension gives us all something positive to plan for: “what’s next?” instead of “what now?”

Website Revisions
 
Last fall, even before the virus forced us all into a world of virtual socializing, teaching, and learning, our inveterate secretary Lydia Soo, and web-weaver Mikesch Muecke, along with dozens of board members and committee chairs began the tedious but necessary process of updating and revising every page on our SESAH website. As with all websites, over the years information changed but didn’t get updated on every page. New fellowships were added, new committee chairs rotated on, and new ways of receiving abstracts were instituted, but artifacts of previous pages remained and needed to be brought up to date or removed. Many of us have been through grinding year-long website updates in our workplaces, but we SESAHers banded together in a can-do volunteer effort to accomplish this in about three months! In late March, Mikesch posted the finishing touches, and it’s something to be proud of. The eye-catching design is familiar, but the information on each page is accurate and easily shared with colleagues and students—check it out at sesah.org and send Mikesch and Lydia a note to congratulate them on this achievement.
 
Recording our own SESAH History
 
Notice also several additions to the website that will increase its usefulness as a reference for our own organizational history. Under the About tab, founding SESAHer Rob Craig contributed a “History of SESAH” that recounts how SESAH came to have three pillars in its mission: Arris, the annual conference, and support for SAH’s Buildings of the United States (BUS) series. Rob and SESAH Secretary Lydia Soo also jointly compiled a helpful list of Past Officers of SESAH, also available on the About tab—this list will help us keep a better sense of our own history as we move forward. I hope future newsletters will contain memories from other longtime SESAH members. If you’ve been ‘round these parts for 20 years or more (I myself am coming up on that milestone in a couple of years), send us a 500-700 word narrative of your SESAH experience at newsletter@sesah.org.
 
Other helpful new reference tools:

• Under the Annual Conferences tab we have been adding downloadable pdfs for each past conference allowing us to digitally archive the Program, Schedule, Abstracts, Study Tour materials, and other miscellany for our conferences. This is material that many of us keep on our bookshelves or in our files and which exists in our paper archive at Georgia Tech University but will now be more easily accessible for all of us even if we didn’t attend a conference. Notice when you visit this page that we still need material for many conferences before 2007, so if you have digital material you can add, contact Lydia Soo at secretary@sesah.org.
• Past SESAH Newsletters, organized chronologically as downloadable pdfs under the Publications/SESAH News tab. Also still under construction.
• Past Recipients of SESAH Travel Grants and Fellowships. If you received a student travel grant before 2002 and want to add your name, contact Lydia Soo at secretary@sesah.org.
• All past awardees for Publications and the Best of the South awards under the Award Opportunities tab.

Coming Soon: Arris 30 

The latest issue of Arris, the Journal of the Southeast chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, is expected to ship to your mailbox by the end of April. Thanks to new editor Mark Reinberger for his work to bring this issue to print! Mark and co-editor Vandana Baweja are already putting together Arris 31, so if you have an article to submit, contact them at reinberg@uga.edu or  vbaweja@ufl.edu. Reminder: If you have moved in the last year or so, please update the SESAH membership roll so you will receive your Arris. Email membership coordinator Ruben Acosta at membership@sesah.org.

Like many of you, I look forward every year to the SESAH conference as a time to catch up with longtime friends and make new friends too, so after this long and disconcerting season of change and anxiety, we look forward to seeing all of you safe and sound at our annual “family reunion” in Natchez, Mississippi.
 
Take care,
Jennifer Baughn