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Newsletter
December 2011
Dear colleagues,
in this letter we would
like to inform you about the activities of the International Economic
History Association since the last newsletter was issued in December
2010, and to draw your attention to decisions taken by the Executive
Committee during its last meeting in Milan (11th-12th November 2011).
First, you will have
noticed that preparations for the World Economic History Congress
(WEHC) in Stellenbosch (9th -13th July 2012) are in full swing.
The Local Organizing Committee in South Africa as well as the IEHA
office is very busy with the preparations of this event. The Local
Organizing Committee was able to win James Robinson, Deirdre McCloskey,
and Gareth Austin as keynote speakers. All information on the congress
as well as the provisional program is available on the congress
website (http://www.wehc2012.org).
Please notice that the registration is now open (http://www.wehc2012.org/general.php),
as well as the call for the poster session. Submissions for the
poster session should be sent by email to sessions@wehc2012.org
before March 1, 2012. You can also find a list of Calls for Papers
that session organisers have asked the WEHC 2012 Programme Secretariat
to publicise: http://www.wehc2012.org/papers.php.
During the EC meeting,
the juries of the dissertation competition met and each decided
on three candidates who will present their PhD research in the dissertation
sessions of the WEHC in Stellenbosch:
The nominated candidates
are as follows:
- Pre-modern: Sebastian
R. Prange (University of Michigan), Pilar Nogues-Marco (Universidad
Carlos III de Madrid), Dries Lyna (Universiteit Antwerpen)
- 19th century: Marta
Felis-Rota (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Julio Martínez-Galarraga
(Universitat de Valčncia), Florian Ploeckl (University of Oxford)
- 20th century: Morten
Jerven (Simon Fraser University), Tamás Vonyó (University of Groningen),
Julius Agbor Agbor (University of Cape Town)
Concerning the academic
program, the Executive Committee discussed the session proposals
that were submitted in reply to the second call for session proposals.
71 out of 113 were accepted, bringing the total number of sessions
up to 130 (59 sessions were accepted in the first round).
Additionally, the Executive
Committee discussed the nominations for seats in the Executive Committee
to be filled in 2012. These nominations were made by the member
associations and were then evaluated by a nomination committee:
Jan Luiten van Zanden (chair), Grietjie Verhoef, Price Fishback,
Catherine Schenk, and Osamu Saito (external member). According to
the statutes, the current vice-president Grietjie Verhoef will become
president for the next term (2012-2015), beginning at the WEHC in
Stellenbosch. The current Treasurer, Luis Bértola, is willing to
serve another term. The Executive Committee supports this. After
having served for two terms, I will step down as Secretary General
at the Congress in Stellenbosch. After careful evaluation, the Executive
Committee decided to endorse the nomination of Debin Ma (London
School of Economics) as the next Secretary General of the IEHA for
election by the General Assembly at its next meeting in Stellenbosch
during the WEHC. As nominees for the vacant EC seats the Executive
Committee selected Mathieu Arnoux (Université Paris Diderot-Paris
7), Joerg Baten (University of Tübingen), Marjolein 't Hart (University
of Amsterdam), Kris E. Inwood (University of Guelph), Min Ma (Central
China Normal University), Pablo Martín Aceńa (University of Alcalá),
Irina Potkina (Institute of Russian History RAS), Knut Sogner (Norwegian
School of Management).
Another very important
decision was the selection of the host city for the 2015 WEHC. After
the presentations of the potential organizers and an extensive discussion
of the proposals, the Executive Committee decided by ballot that
the World Economic History Congress in 2015 will take place in Kyoto!
As Japan is going to host the WEHC in 2015, the Executive Committee
endorses the nomination of Tetsuji Okazaki (University of Tokyo)
as the next Vice-President.
Thirdly, I would like
to introduce shortly the CLIO-INFRA project. In 2010, the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded a subsidy to
the project CLIO-INFRA, of which Jan Luiten van Zanden was the main
applicant and for which the International Institute for Social History
(IISH) fulfills the secretarial function. Under the title of CLIO-INFRA,
a set of interconnected databases will be set up containing worldwide
data on social, economic, and institutional indicators for the past
five centuries, with special attention to the past 200 years. These
indicators will allow research into long-term development of worldwide
economic growth and inequality. The Executive Committee of the IEHA
serves as Stakeholder Committee within this project which advises
the Steering Committee of the CLIO-INFRA project. For more information,
please visit http://www.clio-infra.eu/.
Since the last meeting
of the Executive Committee in November 2010, the IEHA Office was
mainly occupied with the pre-evaluation of the session proposals
of the second round for the WEHC 2012, the preparation of a report
that compares the three bids for the WEHC in 2015, prepared the
EC meeting in Milan, and handled the submission for the dissertation
competition.
In addition, the first
results of the questionnaire project on the situation of economic
history worldwide are published now on the IEHA homepage: http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/ieha/.
As another project, we
had started the initiative 'pioneer tutoring' at the WEHC in Utrecht,
in which we interviewed young scholars from countries where economic
history does not have a broad personnel base both before and during
the congress about their situation and the one of our field in their
country. Given that this initiative received a lot of interest,
we decided to expand it into a mentoring initiative providing intercontinental
communication with other (mostly senior) scholars beyond world congresses.
This is framed now by a larger research project by the German Ministry
of Science and Technology, which is organized by a leading economist
of university education studies, Professor Kerstin Pull. The project
manager and expert of this project is Julia Muschallik (both University
of Tübingen).
I thank Valeria Prayon
and Franziska Tollnek for their excellent work for the IEHA office,
the leaders of the national associations for their quick responses,
and the Executive Committees members and the African Local Organizing
Committee for their hard work.
I wish you all a happy
and successful new year and I am looking forward to an exciting
World Economic History Congress 2012!
With kind regards,
Joerg Baten
Secretary General
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