From the SFRA Executive Committee
From the President
Hugh O’Connell
As I look out my office window here in Boston and notice the trees starting to bud, my mind turns to two things: the end of the Spring semester and the annual SFRA conference. This year, as part of our efforts to increase the SFRA’s international representation, we’re partnering with der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (the German Association for Research in the Fantastic, or GfF) for the joint Disruptive Imaginations Conference.
After attending the virtual 2021 conference hosted by Graham J. Murphy and Seneca College and missing out entirely on the 2022 conference hosted by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and the CoFutures collective due to contracting Covid-19, I’m very much looking forward to attending the Disruptive Futures conference in-person, while also taking part in the virtual programming. The organizers have received a stunning number of proposals from an international pool of applicants, and we’re quite optimistic that the conference will continue the ongoing work of globally expanding the SFRA by bringing this internationally diverse array of scholars into conversation with one another.
By now, everyone who sent a proposal should have heard back from the selection committee, but if for some reason you are still waiting, please contact the conference organizers, Julia Gatermann and Moritz Ingwersen at disruptive.imaginations@tu-dresden.de. And for those attending the conference in-person, as you begin to make your travel plans, make sure to check out the resources that the organizers are providing at the dedicated conference website: https://disruptiveimaginations.com. Here, you can find information in both English and German about accommodations, getting around Dresden, and some of the special events that are being planned for both in-person and virtual conference attendees, with more information to be added as we get closer to the start of the conference. And speaking of planning, we’ll be contacting the recipients of the SFRA’s travel grants in the first week of May.
Looking ahead, we’re scheduling another European conference in Estonia in 2024, before heading back to the United States for 2025 and 2026. The SFRA depends on volunteer conference organizers; so, if you would like to see the conference come to your area, please consider putting in a bid to host the conference (the SFRA is currently taking proposals for 2027 and beyond). You can contact me directly, and I’ll be happy to discuss what hosting the conference entails and how to go about putting a proposal together. Even if you are only curious at this stage, please feel free to reach out!
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