A short report from the FIEC congress in Bordeaux

The XIV:th FIEC congress is now successfully ended, and we send our warmest thank you to the organizers, notably Valérie Fromentin and Sophie Gotteland. They gave us all a splendid congress, with interesting papers and good surroundings for the social encounters that are also part of a successful conference.  Our thanks also to all the student assistants who were extremely helpful and managed to solve all problems in very short time! A striking feature was that all papers, at least the ones that the present blogger attended, held very good quality. The organization committee had obviously made a great job in selecting the best contributions within each panel. There are of course always things that could have been made differently – perhaps the number of panels could have been a little smaller, perhaps the ventilation of some of the lecture rooms could have been a little better – but all in all I believe we left Bordeaux with the feeling that we had learnt a lot, seen a lot, made new contacts and generally had a very good time!

A short report from the FIEC general assembly

As usual, the general assembly was held during the congress. If I counted correctly, 44 of our member associations were present. We lost one member society (Société des Études Anciennes du Québec) but gained two new ones: ANTIKA in Skopje, and the Russian Association of Classical Studies. They are both most warmly welcome as members of the FIEC!

The election of the board meant a major reorganisation. Our president, Dame Averil Cameron, left after 10 years on the board – a heartfelt thanks for all she has done for FIEC during this period! The vice presidents Ana Maria Tobia de Gonzales and Pascal Arnaud had also served their 2 periods and could not be re-elected. At the same time, the decision taken in Bari to increase the number of board members came into function, which means that we now have a board consisting of 10 people. Our new president is Franco Montanari, who has served FIEC as treasurer for more than 20 years. Gunhild Vidén takes over the task as treasurer, whereas Paul Schubert stays on as secretary general for another period of 5 years. I think we are all very grateful for that. The new board members are as follows: Benjamin Acosta-Hughes (USA), Chris Carey (United Kingdom), Jesús de la Villa (Spain), Valérie Fromentin (France), Martha Irigoyen (Mexico), Christiane Reitz (Germany), and Georgia Xanthaki-Karamanou (Greece). All members of the board will have their special functions, and the hope is that we will get more work done and ease some of the work load off the shoulders of the secretary general.

The assembly received an invitation from our colleagues in the Netherlands, through their delegate Albert Rijksbaron, to the next general assembly in 2017. Our British colleagues presented an invitation, through the delegates Chris Carey and John North, to the next congress which will take place in London in 2019. Both invitations were accepted with great enthusiasm.

The minutes from the general assembly will be sent out to the associations, as usual. Don’t forget to spread the information within your own association!

New opportunity for PhD studies

The University of Uppsala offers a position as PhD student in Greek (classical or Byzantine), see http://www.uu.se/en/join-us/jobs-detail-page/?positionId=42031. Deadline is October 18th.

Two colloquia

Centro de Estudios Helenicos in Argentina invites to its 7^th international Colloquium in La Plata, June 2015. See more information below.

The next International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (New Series) will be held in
Rome 2015, March 23th – 27th. Preliminary information is found in the following website:
www.greeklinguistics2015.wordpress.com. Deadline for submitting a proposal of a paper (title + abstract) is 1st November 2014.