Dear CAMWS colleagues,
We have good news to brighten your weekend.
First, the revised version of the program for Virtual CAMWS 2020 may now be accessed here:
https://camws.org/virtualcamws2020.
We are pleased that 66% of the presentations planned for the original meeting in Birmingham will still occur virtually on May 26-30, 2020. We expect well over 300 of our members to attend the virtual meeting.
If you have not yet registered for it, you can do so here:
https://camws.org/node/1751
.
Many thanks to the 86 brave souls who have agreed (or re-agreed) to serve as presiders or moderators. Rest assured that you are in good and safe hands with our in-house Zoom experts, Amy Pistone and Emma Vanderpool. Instructions for presiders, moderators, and presenters will be provided later next week. Please stay tuned.
Our current plan is to have a "tech assistant" assigned to each of the sections in the program to help things run smoothly and to deal with any emergencies. If you are a tech-savvy CAMWS member and would like to volunteer your services, there is a convenient sign-up form here:
The Executive Committee has just approved a proposal that CAMWS contribute $5000 to the newly established
SCS-WCC COVID-19 Relief Fund and offer a free 1-year CAMWS membership as an option for any of the recipients. Our hope is that the other classical associations in North America will follow our lead so that, by consolidating our resources, the fund can grow as large as possible. We are grateful to the SCS and WCC for spearheading this initiative and providing a way for CAMWS as an institution to assist those classicists who are most in need of relief funds. We encourage individual donations as well; if you wish, you may use the donation designation button that is being added to the CAMWS website this weekend.
You will soon find yet another donation designation button there: the Executive Committee has voted to name one of the CAMWS Excavation and Field School Awards after McKenzie ("Mac") Lewis of the University of Waterloo, who passed away suddenly on March 8. Mac had directed the Villa del Vergigno Archaeological Project since 2012 and had won a CAMWS faculty-undergraduate collaborative research grant last year for digitizing data from the excavations. He was serving on the CAMWS Resolutions Committee at the time of his death. We have already received $1000 in pledges toward "The Mac Award"!
The CAMWS website now contains a link to a
calendar of
upcoming virtual events for classicists:
Extraordinary thanks are due to Tom Sienkewicz and Jevanie Gillen, who have spent the past month buried in an avalanche of paperwork. Few people could have coped so gallantly and so graciously with the complications of converting an in-person meeting into a virtual one. Please be patient about receiving your refund checks; if all goes well, they should reach you in mid-May. We do not yet have the results of the various translation exams, but we will distribute them as soon as we do.
The Closing Ceremonies of Virtual CAMWS 2020 will feature, in addition to the
ovationes, the presidential address, and a necrology, special recognition of this year's CAMWS award-winners and this year's Local Committee and Program Committee. I encourage you to Zoom in and help us honor our students and colleagues.
Meanwhile I wish for all of you the courage, strength, calm, and technological ingenuity needed to make it through the rest of the school-year. Remember that all of your friends in CAMWS are rooting for you!
Sincerely,
