Warsaw, January 30, 2020
Dear Friends and Colleagues, Members of the IEMFS,
The winter break finally gave me enough time to put together various pieces of information about the activities of our Society. Some of you may be aware of at least a part of the recent developments, now it seems like a good moment to bring you all up to date.
The most important forthcoming event is the conference “Re-Orientating E. M. Forster: Texts, Contexts, Receptions” (all the details are available here). I guess many of us are trying to get our papers ready on time for the early April. I hope to see you all in Cambridge in just three months.
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the conference “Only Connect: Reconsidering E. M. Forster’s and Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s Howards End,” which took place in Paris in December 2019. If any of you went to Paris, we will all be very grateful if you could write a brief conference report which we shall put on our Society website and on our Facebook page. If you hear about a Forster-related conference or plan to organise one, make sure to let us know and we will make sure to let everybody know about it!
We still have some past conferences to deal with and some new ones to think about. Perhaps a few of you can still remember our meeting in Olsztyn. The work on the volume of conference proceedings is now in its final stages and we are quite confident to make it available by the end of this year, published by Cambridge Scholars Press. At this point I must apologise as I am personally responsible for the most recent delay. This last semester was extremely busy for me and some of my best laid plans went horribly a-gley. I promise to deal with my part of the editing process as soon as possible to keep up with the current deadlines.
Some more of you may also remember our Ludwigsburg conference and here we have some good news as well. Our report from the conference appeared in the most recent issue of the Papers on Language and Literature (55.4/2019) and we have been invited to prepare a special issue of the journal for 2021. As the issues of the PLL are relatively short (112 pages each), we were forced to invite only very few of the participants to submit their papers. At the moment we have no specific plans concerning further publications of materials but we should think about it again when the Olsztyn volume is available. Any suggestions are more than welcome!
We did not celebrate Morgan’s birthday this year with yet another database but rest assured the collection of materials for the third one is well advanced and we shall soon ask you to help us with the task. In the meantime you can check here and here and let us know if there is anything missing. Are all the translation from your country included? Please, use the link at the bottom of the page to submit missing translations and e-mail me if you know of any adaptations of any kind.
We try to keep our page, our Facebook fanpage and our Facebook group as up to date as possible but there is only so much we can do without your assistance, so make sure to let us know if there is anything Forster-related you think we should share with other Forsterians.
Finally, I would like to welcome our new members – our Society has at the moment 81 members, ten more since the end of 2018! Don’t forget to let your friends know about our activities and invite them to join us!
All the best in 2020!
Krzysztof Fordoński
Chairman of the International E. M. Forster Society