There’s a lot going on, no? I was in a meeting during the second week of the semester with other department chairs and our provost to talk specifically about all the ongoing threats to higher education, and the provost ended the meeting blithely remarking that that the chaos of the past several weeks felt eerily like the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I’ve been thinking about the fact that many of our junior colleagues have largely only known the ebb and flow of chaos over the past several years. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the role of professional organizations, like AEJMC, and the stability and community we have strived to cultivate in the division, especially over the past several years. Successive leaders and officers in the division have worked to sharpen the focus on diverse experiences in media history in our conference programming and in our publications while also clarifying the value engaging with the division offers. As our campuses reckon with whatever instability the future brings, as administrators strategize about the language they may use to refocus academic missions away from DEI, as they make hard decisions about budgets in the face of changes to the federal funding landscape, I remain hopeful for the way scholarly community can provide a sense of stability and that the ongoing work of producing and evaluating knowledge continues.

And so, the work of the division continues. The August conference is just over the horizon, coming into view, and folks have been hard at work preparing. Award committees have been hard been evaluating a truly competitive array of submissions. The research competition deadline is coming. Jason Guthrie has agreed to take on the role of research chair after Autumn Linford had to step away, and he will be reaching out to recruit volunteers to review. Please do volunteer; its perhaps the most crucial bit of service to keep the conference a valuable experience for faculty and graduate students alike. This whole enterprise is built on thoughtful peer review, and one of the key bits of value we can offer our academic community is the careful, productive evaluation of our peers’ work.

I also want to draw special attention to the Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in Teaching of Media History. As history moves around the curriculum, folks may question whether their work qualifies. I assure you it likely does. Recent winners have demonstrated creative ways of integrating history into broader studies and skills classes. If you have an assignment that foregrounds history and historical thinking, consider submitting. The teaching award session is one of the most generative at the conference, and the pedagogical creativity of our members is truly something special.