From the SFRA Executive Committee
From the President
Hugh O’Connell
It’s been a rather busy start to 2025 for the SFRA. First up, we had the election of two new Executive Committee members. Please welcome Chris Pak (Vice President) and Joshua Pearson (Treasurer). As long-time members of the sf scholarly community, many will already by familiar with Chris and Josh from their numerous publications, conference presentations, and previous service to the SFRA and other sf-related organizations. Alongside Josh and Chris, we also have a brand new (and much needed!) web director: David Shipko. Many thanks to David for volunteering for the position!
I want to take a moment to personally thank our outgoing VP, Ida Yoshinaga, and outgoing Treasurer, Tim Murphy, for their dedication and service to the SFRA. Both have been instrumental in shaping the SFRA, as we’ve worked to move on from the Covid-19 years and continue the mission of the organization. Ida has worked tirelessly to bolster the SFRA’s Country Representatives program to help meet our goal of diversifying the SFRA and increasing its outreach. Tim helped to oversee two international conferences (which took a lot of creative accounting work!) and has helped to secure our accounts after some recent horrifying fraudulent activity (which he got reversed!). It’s been a real pleasure working with them over the last couple of years.
As the new year begins, we’ve also re-opened the membership portal for renewals and new memberships. This year you may notice an increase in membership costs. Unfortunately, due to rising journal costs and general inflation, for the first time in as long as the current board can remember, we find ourselves needing to raise costs in order to keep the SFRA financially afloat. We always strive to keep costs and overhead as low as possible and didn’t make this decision lightly, but we were faced with some sharp increases, particularly in relation to the cost of journals. As always, all money generated by the SFRA goes towards basic operation costs, and to our membership in the form of travel grants, “support a scholar grants,” and our yearly awards (any member can review our yearly expenses via the yearly Treasurer’s report published in The SFRA Review). The Executive Committee receives no remuneration of any kind (we each pay our own membership costs and pay all of our own conference costs), so we appreciate what it means to raise these rates.
Related to opening the membership renewals, we’ve heard from some members that they’ve run into issues with the PayPal portal. Josh and David are currently looking into this. While most members have been able to renew without any complication, if you are having a problem, please reach out to us directly (all of our contact info can be found under the “About” link on sfra.org or by clicking here).
Finally, two last pieces of news. First up, the acceptance letters for the 2025 conference in Rochester have gone out via email and the registration portal is active on our site. To register for the site, you will first need to be an active member (you can renew or join here) and you will need to be signed into your account to access the conference registration portal. Finally, the chair for the Innovative Research Award, John Rieder, is seeking nominations.
As always,if you have an event that you’d like to bring to rest of the SFRA membership’s attention through its email lists or social media sites, or you have other ideas or concerns about the work the organization is doing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at hugh.oconnell@umb.edu or our new Outreach Officer, Anastasia Klimchynskaya (anaklimchynskaya@gmail.com). We’d love to hear from you!
SFRA Review 