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December 04, 2006
IAFA Elections
The following announcement has been posted to the iafa-members listserv, which posts only to members in good standing of the association. In the near future, ballots will also be sent to the members list, so it's important for all members to make sure that they're receiving messages from that listserv. If the following did not arrive in your email inbox and you are a current IAFA member, please contact Len Hatfield right away.
Dear IAFA Member:
You are receiving this missive as a part of the election process for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. This election addresses the selection of a new President and a new First Vice
President for the organization, due to the very able completion of their terms by the current incumbents, Mike Levy and Farah Mendlesohn, respectively.
After completing the Calls for Nominations, the Executive Board has received a single nomination for the Presidency, and two nominations for the First Vice Presidency.
In order to complete the election process mandated by the IAFA Constitution and Bylaws, the Board offers their Candidate Statements below.
Note: these statements are solely for information purposes; we will conduct the election in the early weeks of the new year using the email system worked out in previous years for all but those few IAFA members who lack email access, and paper ballots for the latter. PLEASE WATCH FOR THE IAFA ELECTRONIC ELECTION BALLOT coming your way soon.
Please do not reply to this message; if you have any questions, please contact
Michael Levy, IAFA President (LevyM@uwstout.edu),
Len Hatfield, IAFA Chief Tech Gnome (len.hatfield@gmail.com), or
Chip Sullivan, IAFA Election Committee (sullivanc@mail.ecu.edu).
Len Hatfield
Chip Sullivan
for the IAFA Elections Committee
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IAFA CANDIDATE STATEMENTS
Farah Mendlesohn, Candidate for President
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What I hope I offer to the IAFA, is a great deal of organisational experience and a passion for the work of others. The opportunity to work with IAFA is for me the opportunity to nurture a space which has been so supportive of new and younger scholars, of independent scholars and of the many authors who attend. As we continue to grow, and as a new generation comes onto the Board and into the various less visible roles of the conference, it is important that change preserves the best of the old, while remaining open to the excitement of the new.
At the time of writing I will have served the IAFA for five years, first as a Division Head (YA literature)and second as 1st Vice-President (the person who takes the papers recruited by the Division Heads and puts the schedule together). What strikes me most about this period is the amount I have learned and the degree to which both experiences have increased my knowledge of science fiction and the fantastic, and my understanding of the sheer scope of work and scholarship now being done in the field.
I’m keen to see new avenues of scholarship welcomed into the ICFA, and keen also to see new authors welcomed. It is the interaction of authors and scholars (academic and independent), many of them bringing both labels, which makes the conference so distinctive.
I was Chair of the Science Fiction Foundation for six years, and Editor of Foundation for another six (I’m standing down from this position in the summer of 2007). I’ve co-organised more than ten conferences — my co-organisers were various configurations of Andrew M. Butler, Andy Sawyer, Edward James and Nickianne Moody — on behalf of my university, the Science Fiction Foundation, and the SFRA. And of course I will have worked on six ICFAs in differing capacities.
I’ve edited and co-edited several essay collections: on Joanna Russ; on Ken MacLeod and on Terry Pratchett with Andrew M. Butler and Edward James, and Bablyon 5 with Edward James. In 2005, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction which I edited with Edward James was awarded a Hugo by the World Science Fiction Convention. What I’m most proud of is the way all of these books, and the journal issues I’ve edited, have showcased the work of our field, and in particular in the pages of the journal have provided a space for new entrants to draw our attention to new subjects and new questions.
My own work is rather varied and I sometimes find it hard to say just what I’m interested in. In 2005 I published a monograph on Diana Wynne Jones. In 2007 I will publish Rhetorics of Fantasy, the basics of which were first published by Bill Senior in the JFA. In addition, I hope to publish The Inter-Galactic Playground with McFarland, a book about children’s and juvenile sf in the late twentieth century. The book came out of an article which Michael Levy and Jan Bogstad accepted in a special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn, but it has expanded far beyond that into a study of the sf community’s reading habits (as I write this I am taking time out from processing 900 responses to a questionnaire) and into ideas about science education, information density and attitudes to the child. When this is done, I hope to return to my first love and work on the development of ideology and language in the early science fiction magazines. I’m fascinated by the period Isiah Berlin — a historian of colonization — would term the “creolization” of the field, as ideas bed down in the 1930s and 1940s, and the first generation of “indigenous” writers appears, those “born and bred” reading science fiction.
Christine Mains, Candidate for First Vice President
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I'm stepping down after two terms on IAFA's Executive Board as Public Information Co-ordinator to run for the position of First Vice President. I've been attending ICFA for seven years, and working hard behind the scenes for six of those years to make sure the conference is a productive and enjoyable experience. In addition to handling conference PR, including editing the Newsletter blog and distributing the Call for Papers, I've been responsible for the program book and have helped out in the bookroom and behind the registration desk. Outside of IAFA, I'm the Editor for the SFRA Review, and in recent years have chaired several committees and worked on the organizing committee for SFRA 2003 in Guelph, a job that included programming and scheduling of paper sessions and panels. I'm very much looking forward to working with
the division heads to co-ordinate the conference programming schedule and to continue working with the rest of the board in guiding IAFA through the challenges of the coming years. As I've said on other
occasions, I am very appreciative of the wonderful opportunities that I've enjoyed as a member of IAFA, and grateful for the support I've always received from IAFA's diverse membership. I'm committed to doing whatever work needs to be done to ensure that the association and the conference continue for many more years, and I hope that you will allow me to continue to serve.
Donald Palumbo, Candidate for First Vice President
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Don Palumbo is Professor of English at East Carolina University, where he teaches courses in science fiction, science fiction films, the short story, and the novel. He has participated in every ICFA meeting for the past 27 years, since ICFA #1 in 1980, is a recipient of the IAFA Robert A Collins Distinguished Service Award (1996), and has served the organization as a member of the original Board of Governors (1982-83), as IAFA Treasurer (1983-89), and as IAFA President (1989-92) and Immediate Past-President (1992-95). Don is co-advisor to McFarland Publisher's "Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy" series and a previous co-advisor to Greenwood Press' "Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy" series. He is also Film Area Chair for the Popular Culture Association, a former PCA Comic Art & Comics Area Chair, a member of the Popular Culture Association's Board of Governors, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of both The Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He has published four books and over seventy articles on science fiction literature and film, comic books, and existential literature and philosophy. He is interested in the VP position because he enjoys the puzzle of assembling the best possible conference program (having done it in 1989-92), is good at it, and also would like to return (after a reasonable hiatus of 12 years) to fuller participation in the organization as an officer.
Posted by ChrissieMains at December 4, 2006 11:52 PM