By Will Mari

Hi folks!

I hope you’re surviving everything—with the new year, and vaccines, it seems like things are, hopefully, finally, slowly … turning a corner. At least, I’ve crossed all my fingers, toes and dog-eared all my pages, to that effect.

I just wanted to give you a brief update on how we’re doing as a division.

First, we’ll find out soon from big AEJMC (probably not long after this goes to print, so to speak), what kind of conference we’ll have this summer. Regardless of whether it’s hybrid in New Orleans or fully virtual, please rest assured that Cayce, Maddie and I have already been planning on several eventualities, and we will be in touch with more information as we get it.

Next, if you haven’t yet, please check out our paper call, and let Maddie or I know if you have questions. Note that we have extended abstracts again as an option this year, with some expanded guidance from the Council of Divisions.

Also, don’t forget the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Master’s Thesis Award, the Covert Award for best mass comm history article or essay, our Donald Shaw Senior Scholar Award, and our teaching award, named in honor of Dr. Jinx Broussard. Please let Amber Roessner, our teaching chair, know if you have questions about the latter. We’d really love to have some great submissions this year, including any and all Zoom/remote-teaching survival ideas. More information about these awards and other calls can be found on our site.

Speaking of our site, we’re working with Keith Greenwood, our webmaster, on updating that this spring, as discussed during our business meeting last year. He’s working on securing our new URL, and we’ll update you as we get more info.

Also, we’ll make a final-final decision soon about a preconference, once we know about the primary conference, but I’d still love your input on that idea. Even if it’s something we do next year, or later, I really believe that it can offer value to our membership and foster our community of scholars and teachers in healthy ways.

Speaking of chair goals, I can report that I’ve been increasing our connections with our international media-history sibling organizations, including the Comm History Division of the International Communication Association, the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) and the Communication History Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

I recently attended a very early morning meeting (at least for me!) of the ECREA, and they’re particularly excited to join us in future initiatives. A number of our members, including Susan Keith, Elisabeth Fondren and Carole O’Reilly, are already involved in this and other groups. Internalization of media history, especially from the U.S. side outwards, will continue to be one of my primary goals as chair and something I hope to work on as a past chair.

We had a good group of submissions into the SE Colloquium, and I should thank Denise Hill and Anthony Hatcher, along with our reviewers, for their help there.

Finally, I know things continue to be uncertain out there, and so I also wanted to thank you, our members, for holding the line and working hard to continue both the teaching of, and research into, the media history that’s so important for understanding this fraught moment.

Please let me know if there’s anything concrete I can do for you. You can reach me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, on Twitter.

#mediahistorymatters and so do you—stay safe and we’ll be in touch.