Annual Meeting
2023 CSBS Annual Meeting
Our next annual meeting is set for May 27–29, 2023. This meeting will be held in-person as a part of the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, which is being hosted by York University. If you have paid your 2023 membership fees or have submitted a paid application to become a new member, you are eligible to present your research and to attend the annual meeting. You will find information in the “Programme Proposals” section in this mailing (note the Wednesday January 18, 2023 deadline for the General Programme). To renew membership online, please access the CSBS website (https://csbs-sceb.ca/register/).
Call for Papers – General Programme
PAPER PROPOSALS
Annual Meeting 2023: May 27 – 29, 2023
To submit a paper proposal to the CSBS General Programme, please log in to the member area of the CSBS website. Once there, click on the “Paper Submission” tab on the right to provide contact details, institutional affiliation, the title of your paper, and your abstract (approx. 100 words).
Proposals for the General Programme are due no later than Wednesday January 18, 2023. The programme is developed in late January and approved by the Executive in February; thus, proposals that are not submitted on time likely cannot be accommodated within the schedule.
If you are unable to participate on a specific day of the week for religious, professional, or personal reasons, please include this information when submitting your proposal. Every effort will be made to accommodate such requests, but please be advised that complex scheduling requirements may not make this possible.
Up-to-date membership in the CSBS is a prerequisite for participation in the Society’s Annual Meeting, therefore paper proposals will only be accepted from those who have paid their 2023 membership dues (note: https://csbs-sceb.ca/register/ to renew online) or have submitted a paid application as a new member. Papers in English or French are invited for presentation in the form of short communications followed by discussion (time for presentation and discussion is usually 30 minutes). Please try to renew your membership for 2023 as soon as possible, since the society’s journal publisher (Sage) needs to prepare subscriptions for Studies in Religion by January 1.
Please note that only active CSBS members are able to log in and submit papers. If you are unsure of your membership status, please contact Treasurer & Membership Secretary, Laura Hare (laura.hare@utoronto.ca). For questions about login credentials, contact Communications Officer, Matthew Thiessen (matthew.thiessen@mcmaster.ca). For questions concerning the programme, please contact Programme Co-ordinator, Ken Ristau (ristauk2@macewan.ca).
Student Affairs and Involvement
CSBS greatly values student involvement. Students may submit proposals to read papers in either special or general sessions, and they are encouraged to enter the student essay competition. First-time student presenters are welcome and are required to submit a letter of endorsement from a professor with their submission of a paper proposal to any general or special session. If you have any questions, please contact the student liaison officer, Laura Kassar (laura.pycock-kassar@umontreal.ca).
Please consider a donation this year to the Dietmar Neufeld Student Travel Fund, the link for which (https://csbs-sceb.ca/donate/) is found on the renewals page of our website. Your support can help offset the (often high) travel costs for student members who will present papers or prepared responses at future in-person events. Many of us have benefited from travel support in the past, so if you are able, please do consider even a modest donation to the Travel Fund this year.
Prizes
Nomination to any of the CSBS prizes is open to all members with an active membership. Nominations may be submitted through the member portal of the CSBS website. If you are unsure of your membership status, please contact Treasurer & Membership Secretary, Laura Hare (laura.hare@utoronto.ca). For questions about login credentials, contact Communications Officer, Matthew Thiessen (matthew.thiessen@mcmaster.ca).
For all items related to the eligibility and evaluation criteria of awards and prizes, please see: https://csbs-sceb.ca. Unless otherwise noted, the deadline for all prizes is December 31, 2021.
Twostudent essay prizesare offered each year (based on the quality of submissions). These include the Founders Prize (Hebrew Bible and cognate disciplines) and Jeremias Prize (New Testament studies and cognate disciplines). Students, please consider submitting your best piece of writing suitable for oral delivery. Faculty, share this announcement with supervisees and encourage senior graduate students to enter the competition. Students may submit a paper simultaneously to the essay competition AND to the general programme. This ensures that the paper will be considered for the latter even if it is not awarded a prize. Please ensure that your online submission is made in PDF form.
We are also announcing a call for nominations for the CSBS Book Awards. This includes the Francis W. Beare Book Award, recognizing an outstanding book in the areas of Christian Origins, Post-Biblical Judaism and/or Graeco-Roman Religions written by a member of the CSBS and published in the current and previous two years (currently those with a copyright date of 2020, 2021, 2022). We are also accepting nominations for this year’s R. B. Y. Scott Book Award, recognizing an outstanding book in the areas of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and/or Ancient Near Eastern Studies written by a member of the CSBS and published in the current and previous two years (currently those with a copyright date of 2020, 2021, 2022).
The category of “outstanding” ought to be understood expansively and may be characterized by persuasiveness and originality, theoretical or methodological innovation, intellectual creativity, and/or the high quality of scholarship that reaches beyond the academic guild and is public-facing. When equally competitive books are considered, preference should be given to authors who have not previously won this award, with a lifetime maximum of two awards given to one scholar.
At the request of the awards committee, please nominate books that (1) make academic contributions to their fields of study and (2) are recognized for their exceptional research insight or implications.
At this time we are also accepting nominations for the Norman E. Wagner Award.This award recognizes and supports research initiatives that rely on the expertise and collaboration of one or more members of the CSBS and may include non-member experts from other disciplines. Projects that represent significant disciplinary innovation without direct collaboration of researchers will also be considered.
The CSBS Executive is also sharing information on the Sir Robert Falconer Award. The Falconer Award is named after the founding President of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. Its purpose is to assist Society members’ research, by providing $1500.00 to support a limited period of time at a study centre, library, museum, or archaeological excavation appropriate to biblical studies and relevant to their research. Given uncertainties around travel in the near future, the CSBS Executive will determine the feasibility of this award in the 2023 year and communicate accordingly. The deadline for this prize is currently set as May 15, 2023.
Call for Papers – Seminars
“Emotion and Affect in Mediterranean Antiquity” – Historicizing Emotions
What changes when we account for affect and emotion in the writing of history and the reading of ancient literature? What social and cultural phenomena are shaped and thrown into new configurations by that unpredictable constant: feeling? A number of recent studies have established affect and/or emotion as a crucial and rich concept for the study of ancient literature and social worlds. The aim of this seminar is to extend and deepen this work in a three-year conversation among interested members of the CSBS. Each year will include a panel of pre-circulated papers on the topics described below as well as an open session on any aspect of the affect and emotion in antiquity.
Even those who argue for a strong, cross-culturally stable foundation for emotion recognize cultural contingency and variation in how emotions are expressed and described. For 2023, we invite papers that explore historical approaches to the role of specific emotions or affect clusters as culturally distinctive artifacts. This could include philology and the translation of vocabularies of feeling (Konstan), the physiological or culturally conditioned expressions of emotion, or the cultivation of a distinct affective practice within a particular social group (Scheer). Proposals should identify the affective locus of the paper and the historical issue at stake in its argument.
Please send proposals of up to 500 words to Colleen Shantz (c.shantz@utoronto.ca). Deadline for proposals is Sunday, January 8, 2023. Accepted papers should be submitted by April 30 so they can be circulated before the conference in order to facilitate discussion.
The Life and Work Harold Remus
CSBS and CSPS begin a joint seminar in 2023 to honour the life and work of Harold Remus, who was a member of both CSBS (from 1976) and CSPS (from 1987) until his passing in 2021. The seminar’s goal is to bring together members who have been influenced by his work, either personally or through his scholarship, to present papers on topics related to Harold’s main scholarly interests. The papers will be collected for an edited volume. The first session will focus on the topic “Healers, Magicians, and Miracle Workers.” As a scholar, Harold was perhaps best known for his work on so-called “magic” and “miracle,” and healing practices in the Roman world more generally. The session will feature four invited papers related to healing from the late Second Temple period to Late Antiquity, with a focus on how miracles, magic and healing were related to social interaction or religious conflict in these ancient contexts. The session will also include one paper by an emerging scholar engaging with Harold’s work in new ways. This call for papers is intended to make our emerging scholars aware of this opportunity. Send a proposal (including a working title and 200-word abstract) to Tony Burke (tburke@yorku.ca) and Mona Tokarek LaFosse (mona.lafosse@utoronto.ca) by Sunday, January 15, 2023. Feel free to inquire also about participation in future sessions of the seminar.
Making Gender and Sexuality with Bodies and Objects in Biblical Literature
We invite papers that explore constructions of genders and sexualities in biblical literature (HB, NT, as well as Second Temple Literature), with a special focus on embodiment, bodies (human, animal, and divine), as well as material objects (ex.: items of dress and adornment, weapons, cultic utensils, etc.).
Please send proposals (up to 100 words) by Wednesday, January 18, 2022 to Anne Létourneau (anne.letourneau.1@umontreal.ca) and Isabelle Lemelin (lemelin.isabelle@uqam.ca).
The Executive
The CSBS Executive this year is composed of seven members: Judith Newman (President), Richard Ascough (Vice-President), Mark Leuchter (Executive Secretary), Laura Hare (Treasurer & Membership Secretary), Matthew Thiessen (Communications Officer), Ken Ristau (Programme Coordinator), and Laura Kassar (Student Liaison Officer).
Nominations are invited for the following positions:
– Vice-President: Self-nominations are accepted. Please send your recommendations by Monday January 31, 2023 to the current Vice-President, Richard Ascough (rsa@queensu.ca).
Fundraising
The CSBS continues to depend on regular donations from its members to sustain the health of the society. This is more important than ever, since SSHRC funding to support student travel was withdrawn in 2012. Hence, your donations to the CSBS’s Dietmar Neufeld Student Travel Fund, matter now more than ever. Please consider a donation via the link on our CSBS web page (https://csbs-sceb.ca/donate/). On this page, donations to support our other worthy funds (such as prize monies for our Book Awards) are also welcome; please see the tab ‘make a donation to the CSBS’ and specify how you would like your donation directed. In light of this, at some point in the next few months you may receive a letter from our President encouraging you to donate to our special funds earmarked for prizes, special lectures, publications, and travel needs for those students whose institutions cannot support them. Please do consider the request seriously. The society is in adequate financial shape in terms of its ability to meet general costs, thanks to the efforts of many of its members over the years, and also thanks to previous society Treasurers and the Endowment Committee, chaired by Bob Derrenbacker (other members include Wayne McCready and Richard Ascough, in addition to the Executive Secretary and the Treasurer & Membership Secretary). An increase in travel and operational costs, however, in combination with a tightening of the purse strings at SSHRC, means that member support is more important than ever. Your help would be very much appreciated.
Electronic Communication
Our communications with the CSBS membership take place primarily via email newsletters. If you have contact information changes, please make these revisions in the member login areas of the CSBS website. For matters related to Society communications or newsletter submissions, please contact Communications Officer, Matthew Thiessen (matthew.thiessen@mcmaster.ca). CSBS also shares news and resources on social media through Twitter and Facebook.
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The CSBS is a contributing member of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (www.fedcan.ca). The CFHSS continues to lobby the federal government to increase the research budget for the humanities and the social sciences. The Federation will hold its Annual Board of Directors Meeting and its General Meeting in Ottawa in November and our society may send a representative to the meeting.
Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion
The CSBS continues to have an important voice in the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion. The current President of the CCSR is Mathieu Boisvert, Université du Québec à Montréal. The CSBS Executive Secretary is our society’s representative to the corporation. The CCSR continues to oversee the publication of Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses through Sage Publishing, and scholarly books through McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book publication programme includes the book series Studies in Christianity and Judaism, edited by Richard Ascough, and Advancing Studies in Religion, edited by Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme. Richard (rsa@queensu.ca) and Sarah (sarah.wilkins-laflamme@uwaterloo.ca) welcome manuscript proposals from CSBS members. Detailed descriptions of the series can be found at www.mqup.ca/our-series-pages-178.php#religion. Submissions to the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses can be made through the Sage submission system at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sir.
For the programmes of previous annual meetings, please consult our online archives here!