14 March 2019
Dear Colleagues,
It was a pleasure to see many familiar faces at the College Art Association Conference in New York, and to meet several younger members of the organization just embarking on promising research in the field. The event was supported by the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the General Representation of the Government of Flanders to the USA, and we were delighted to hear words of support from Joost Taverne and Laurence de Wolf as representatives of those two agencies, respectively. We were happy to once again hold the reception at Syracuse University’s elegant Lubin House. HNA is extraordinarily healthy as an organization, and we have increased our membership by more than twenty percent in the year and a half since launching our new websites for HNA, JHNA and HNAR.
The HNA-sponsored session at CAA this year, “The Female Impact: Women and the Art Market in the Early Modern Era,” chaired by Frans Grijzenhout and Judith Noorman, featured talks by Michele Frederick, Nicole Elizabeth Cook, and Catherine Powell. Its subject matter and methodological approaches to patronage and feminist studies drew a large audience beyond just specialists in our field. It is vitally important that HNA continue to have a vibrant presence at CAA, to demonstrate the leadership and new directions in our areas of study, and we encourage you to propose a session for next year’s conference!
The major news that came out of our board meeting was the decision on our next two conference venues. We will be in Amsterdam and The Hague in 2021, and London in 2024. Frans Grijzenhout of the University of Amsterdam and Chris Stolwijk of the RKD are the primary organizers for 2021. Meredith Hale is the principle organizer for 2024, and Loughborough University’s new London campus will be our primary host venue. As previously announced, we are moving now to a three-year interval for the HNA Conference, and thus trying to get ahead on the planning. We thank all of those who made queries and formal proposals to host the conference. We can see great interest around the globe, and yet we only have a few spots available. To sustain that interest between our major conferences, we hope to plan more small events in various locations. These may include symposia, study days related to collections or exhibitions, or other formal and informal gatherings of colleagues. While our funding is limited for such events, we are happy to help organize them and generate interest through our website and announcements. If you have ideas or proposals, please feel free to write to me directly at president@hnanews.org, to administrator@hnanews.org, or directly to our new European liaisons, Jan Blanc and Angela Jager. At our board meeting they presented several firm proposals to give HNA a more consistent presence in Europe, and we will pass along further information in the near future.
Speaking of our administrator, we are making a transition. Caro Fowler has served the organization wonderfully for the past year and a half, as we transitioned to the new website. We thank her for that service, and now are pleased to announce that Marsely Kehoe will take over this vital role in the organization. Please welcome her!
Updates to the websites will be implemented in the coming months, to enable easier navigation, especially with the exhibitions, and to further highlight our news items. We also are fine-tuning our membership joining and payment process. The transition to online payments by credit card has not been the easiest for everyone, and we will work hard to improve our lines of communication to make the process as simple as possible. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any difficulty logging into the membership parts of the website, where you can access the membership directory, read our bibliographies, join our discussion forum and update your personal information and payment details.
We have also decided to make a small change to our HNA Fellowships going forward. Up to now, we have not designated any particular type of project that we sponsor, although we have tended to favor proposals in the late stages of production. Going forward we will offer two fellowships in this traditional sense, but we will also reserve a fellowship for doctoral research. We will make a more precise announcement in the coming months, and the deadline will be later in the year.
We also have a change to our field editors for HNAR. Mark Trowbridge has served for many years as our editor for 15th-century reviews. That position will now be filled by Douglas Brine. We thank both of these colleagues.
We are pleased to team up again with the Italian Art Society for a reception at the Renaissance Society of America Conference in Toronto. While I cannot make it there this year, unfortunately, HNA will be ably represented at the conference and at the event.
With best wishes for the spring and summer,
Paul Crenshaw
HNA president
Providence, Rhode Island, USA