Spring News

Dear Members and Friends of the International E. M. Forster Society,

It is hard to believe how time flies. It has been almost half a year since we met in Olsztyn, and the time has come to give you some account of what we have been up to during these six months. Those of you who follow our Facebook activities or our website might have already noticed some changes. Here is a brief account of what happened and what you might have missed.

The Book

The progress of our book is much slower than we (rather optimistically…) originally intended. We have eight submitted chapters but… eight more are in progress as their authors asked us for extension. In order to accommodate their requests (and give those of you who decided not to send your work because you found our original deadline too close), we extend the deadline for all to June 1st, 2017. We still hope to be able to present the book at our next conference.

You will probably be happy to hear that our first honorary member Michael Cunningham has agreed to write a short preface while our newest member Prof. Jeremy Tambling (welcome to the Society!) has already submitted his chapter. If you want to join such an illustrious company, do not wait a minute longer and submit your work now!

As we stated, the selection will be edited and reviewed – however, any materials which do not fall within the scope of our project may be submitted again to a special Forsterian issue of Polish Journal of English Studies (you can find the details here), which should appear by the end of 2017.

The Conference – Ludwigsburg 2018

As the main organiser of our next conference, Dr Heiko Zimmermann, decided to seek greener pastures in charming Ludwigsburg (congratulations on your new job!), our conference had to follow suit. Unfortunately, we will not be able to maintain the original plans and the conference will be held in the spring of 2018.

For those of you who like to make long-term plans, another major E. M. Forster conference is expected to take place at Cambridge in 2020.

If you hear about any Forster-related conferences (or intend to organise one on your own), please, make sure to send the call for papers so that we could advertise it through our website and FB fanpage.

Membership

Our Society has grown since our last meeting to 49 members from 20 countries but there is certainly room for many more – have you invited all of your friends?

You might also click here and check whether the data we included are correct and up to date – should anything change, do let us know!

The Website

Our website has grown only a little since we last met – you can find now some materials from our Olsztyn conference. Is there anything you think is missing there? Please, do let us know!

The Databases

The most important new addition to our website is the first of the databases we promised – including translations of E. M. Forster, which you can find here. You can now check which of his works are available in your language and, if you know of any editions that are missing from the database, add them yourself using this form.

Two more databases are already in progress, so stay tuned!

Activities Online

Our activities online are not limited to our webpage. We try to be active on Facebook, so if you are (or want to be) on FB and you have not yet found us there, follow the links to our fanpage and group.

MLA has recently started a new free access project for sharing your academic work called Humanities Commons, so we decided to join in and created our group called Edward Morgan Forster. It is rather quiet there, but this means there is a lot of empty space for your work. Do not keep us waiting – join now!

As you can see we did not hibernate through the winter like bears do but tried to make as much as possible of our plans come true. You will hear from us again when we complete the collection of chapters for the book, but we hope to hear from you in the meantime.

Yours Sincerely

Krzysztof Fordoński

Anna Kwiatkowska

Heiko Zimmermann

2 thoughts on “Spring News

  1. Noriko Takasaka says:

    I am very happy to find the International E. M. Forster Society. I am the first year of doctoral course and have been studying the works of E. M. Forster at Nihon Univ. in Japan. I wrote the Master thesis about Howards End. Its theme was Leonard Bast’s Role in this novel. I would like to know more about this Society.

    Sincerely,

Leave a Reply to Krzysztof Fordonski Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *