15 May 2009

Dear Colleagues,

We greatly look forward to meeting you in Antwerp on Monday, 22 June, if not before. Please note that the first event on our schedule is an introductory meeting at Lessius College at 9AM on the 22nd. To this end, you ought to arrive at Hotel Cammerpoorte no later than the previous day.

We would like this program to be as non-prescriptive and participatory as possible. We shall not function as “teachers,” and you will not join this group as “students” in a graduate seminar. Functioning as facilitators, we shall join you as peers engaged in collegial exploration of interests that we share in common. Please exploit this seminar as a means of advancing your own research and enriching your classroom teaching after your return to your home institution. As much as possible, we would like to employ the daily readings as a means of providing talking points and “seeding” discussion of issues that are central to your research as individuals and as members of a group who share many interests in common. We would like to invite each one of you to serve as discussion leader for one of the daily readings. We also invite you to make presentations concerning your research plans and/or findings and to discuss questions that come up during the course of your research. Based upon past experience, we believe that it is a good idea to distribute individual presentations across our four weeks in Oxford rather than cluster all of them together at the end. Please feel free to bring short papers, work-in-progress, and powerpoint presentations with you, because you will have opportunities to present them during seminar sessions. Simply inform us in advance about what you would like to do.

Our schedule provides us with a structure to work within. Please consider our posted schedule for presentations concerning your individual research projects (these are not mandatory) and our daily readings. During one of our opening meetings, we plan to circulate this list for each of you to sign up for particular presentations. Most if not all of our program materials are now available to you at CARMEN. We are relying on you to print copies of our schedule, daily readings, maps, and so forth. We shall have no means of distributing paper copies to the group. In addition, we plan to employ CARMEN or e-mail as a means of distributing information during the course of our program.

You should already have received a copy of our final seminar schedule, which is also posted to our web site. A series of maps and instructions for how to reach seminar sites is posted to CARMEN. If you have questions, please contact Mark Rankin or approach us directly.

Sincerely yours,



John N. King (king.2@osu.edu)




James K. Bracken (bracken.1@osu.edu)