When is the next Big Berks?

/ Historiann

More than one person has googled that question in the past few weeks, and it led those people to Historiann.com.  In the spirit of service to all humankind that is Historiann’s raison d’être, let’s give the people what they want, shall we?

  • WHEN:  Sometime in June 2011.  The date will be announced probably sometime later next fall or winter.
  • WHERE:  Undecided, although the consensus at the business meeting on Sunday morning three weeks ago was that it probably should move to the east again, after California in 2005 and Minnesota last weekend.  My prediction is that it will be held in a central portion of a state that begins with “M,” although another great idea was to hold it in a major city that has the first initial “P.”
  • These decisions are the major order of business for the Little Berks meeting, October 3-5, at Interlaken, Connecticut.  Anyone is free to attend–show up and lobby for your favorite east coast location!  (Bonus points for being willing to host the conference at your university!)  Ordinarily, the Little Berks meeting is in the spring, except in years when we’ve had a Big Berks meeting, and then it’s in the fall.  (Please review Tenured Radical’s definitions and explanations of the Little Berks and the Big Berks, if you’re unclear on the distinctions.)
  • TIME LINE:  Please review the letter posted at Blogenspiel last month–that’s about what our timeline was for the 2008 conference.  Please note that proposals will probably be DUE IN WINTER 2010, just eighteen months from now, and about eighteen months ahead of the next conference.  (We’re an all-volunteer organization, without the paid staff like the AHA and OAH have to put on our massive conference, with 1,100+ people on the program.  Automating our applications with a web submissions system helped make it easier to circulate proposals to our sub-committee members, but didn’t save us enough time to move the deadline for proposals back.  So much work for the program happened throughout last summer after our Program Committee meeting, and I can’t imagine having to teach while managing all of the details about panels falling apart and other sesions still being assembled!)
  • In the end, however the 2011 Program Committee co-Chairs are sovereign, so they’ll set their own deadlines.  You can look here for more information about the 2011 conference as it becomes available.

0 thoughts on “When is the next Big Berks?”

  1. I’d just like to add one thing–if you show up at the Little Berks in October with suggestions as to where the next Big Berks should be held, that will be too late. A final decision will be required at that time, so a formal offer from any potential host institution will have to be already in hand.

    If you are interested in hosting the conference at your institution, or if you have other suggestions, you can contact berks@umn.edu. Please note that it is not possible any longer to host this conference at a small college in a small town. It has grown large enough that it requires either a lot of dorm rooms or a lot of hotel rooms, and preferably both.

    In addition to the possibilities Historiann mentions, there was also some suggestion that the next Berks be held outside the US, perhaps in a North American country beginning with “C”.

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