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Message from the New President January 3, 2009 Dear colleagues, First
of all, on behalf of the new board, I wish you all a happy new year! I want
to thank Professor Ping Yao and her team for their dedication to the CHUS in
the past two years. We are excited to be elected recently as
members of the new board. Most of us met in As CHUS
members, we are a unique group. We are a special product of East and West. We
are the fortunate beneficiaries of Our
field of Chinese history has experienced dramatic changes. Departing from
traditional narrative writing, we have embraced a variety of approaches to
study the five thousand year history of the Middle Kingdom. We have broadened
the scope of probing her long past and we have tapped virgin land from a
number of interdisciplinary angles. The achievements have been remarkable,
and the prospects most promising. Yet, more new fields can be developed, more
new soil tilled, and more theories formulated. As CHUS members, we bring
together the best from the Chinese and western historiographical
traditions. Under the flag of the CHUS we can contribute more to Now the
torch has been passed to this new board. It symbolizes responsibility, duty
and obligation. We will rely on all of our CHUS members. Your support is
indispensable. The new board will listen to your suggestions eagerly. We will
give you our fullest cooperation, and do our best to serve you diligently. We
will not flinch or complain, but will work with all our energy and ability.
Reflecting on the past and looking forward to the future, we think the
following are the most important issues. (1). Our
journal: The Chinese Historical Review. In the past four years, Dr. Xi Wang, Dr.
Alan Baumler and Dr. Hanchao Lu have done an excellent job and have won
widespread praise. Yet, there may be financial difficulties ahead. For our
part, the board will submit applications to foundations to seek support. Individual
donations can become a new source of income. Institutional donations remain
welcome. Also, we are grateful to our former president Professor Ping Yao for
her willingness to join the editorial board. (2).
Membership: We have been working on updating our membership list and we also
very much want to encourage our present members to become life members if
they are not already so. Please contact Dr. Jiayan
Zhang (jzhang3@kennesaw.edu) for this regard. (3).
Conferences: We will continue to arrange panels for the AHA. We are grateful
to Dr. Xia Yafeng (Yafeng.Xia@liu.edu) for his continuing service. We would
like to encourage you to participate in AHA conferences and use them as a
forum to display your recent scholarship, which we could say not only belongs
to you, but also reflects on our organization and the AHA as well. (4).
Budget management: Professor Wang Shuo (swang@csustan.edu) is our treasurer.
Her meticulous care will enable us to use every penny for a significant
purpose, in particular to support our journal and sponsor AHA conferences.
Our budget report will be submitted to the CHUS members for its examination. (5).
Newsletter: To facilitate scholarly interchange, I encourage members to
submit to Professor Xiaoyuan Liu (xyliu@iastate.edu)
news of academic activities, publications, fellowships, employment and
promotions, and also items on teaching. This is an essential channel for
displaying our accomplishments. (6).
Awards: academic excellence award and service award. We will organize a
committee to evaluate each piece and grant one award in each category. Please
submit nominations, including your own publications, to this committee (to be
announced in the autumn) for consideration. To be a
part of the new team is not an easy job, because many challenges await us in
this hard time of world economic downturn. The new board will do our best.
Our job is not a battlefield: we do not have an enemy to fight against,
neither do we have a trophy to win, but we have a prestigious society to
serve. Our job is to carry on our twenty years’ tradition of scholarly
dedication to our beloved CHUS. I believe that our collective endeavors will
continue to bear fruit and that in future years we will have much to look
upon with pride. Finally,
on behalf of the new board, I wish all of you a pleasant, prosperous,
propitious, potent and productive year ahead: Happy 2009! Sincerely, Patrick Fuliang Shan Department of History (shanp@gvsu.edu) |
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