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Newsletter No 34: Fall 2002

Message from Our President

The plans for the Belfast conference are going well. The second deadline at the end of October produced a large number of proposals. We were very pleased with the quality and range of submissions for individual papers and panels. It is particularly gratifying to see proposals from so many different countries - at the last count we had submissions from over thirty countries and five continents.
We are now reading through the proposals and hope to make decisions about all of them within the next few weeks. We will contact everyone with our verdict by early December at the latest. Our aim is to have a provisional timetable ready by January. We also plan to send out registration and booking forms by that time also. This should give people plenty of time to make travel arrangements and apply for funding. We look forward to meeting you all in Belfast.

Board Meeting at the Berkshire Conference

The issue of funding for graduate students to attend the conference was discussed at our Board meeting at the Berkshire Conference in June 2002. It may prove difficult for national committees to fund expenses for travel to an overseas conference but we would urge you to do your best. We shall have a small fund to pay the expenses of two or three graduate students who have submitted paper proposals. We will identify possible recipients from our list within the next few weeks.
At the Board meeting we also discussed the creation of an archive for the records of the IFRWH. As we are now into the third generation of Board Members, everyone agreed that it was essential that we keep a record of the activities of the Federation. We will report in more detail on this project by the time of the Belfast conference.

Books and Videos

At the Belfast conference we would like to have a book exhibition and a video room for the showing of videos related to the main conference themes. We would welcome suggestions of names of publishers to be contact or the names of videos that could be shown.

Mary O'Dowd