Religious History Association

Second Annual General Meeting

Minutes

19 November 2012

6-7.30 pm at Macquarie University, room W6A308

In attendance: Hilary Carey (President), John Gascoigne (Treasurer), Stuart Piggin (Secretary), Carole Cusack (JRH editor), Ian Tregenza.

Apologies: Philip Almond, Chris Hartney, Shurlee Swain

1. Minutes of 28 May 2012 of the Religious History Association.

The Minutes were accepted as a true record

2. Matters Arising

2.1 Mansfield Prize (dealt with under the Editor’s report below)

2.2 RHA Fellows after whom prizes might be named. Consideration of this matter was held over to the next meeting.

3. President’s Report (Hilary Carey)

· National: Affiliation with CHASS

· RHA membership of CHASS has not been renewed owing to the peripheral value of CHASS to the purposes of RHA

· Report of RHA Conference, Adelaide, 9 – 13 July 2012.

· The President reported that this worked well for the RHA. Although the plenary speaker, Barry Kosmin, was not able to attend, he has undertaken to send a paper.

· The panel discussion worked well, generating good debate. Hilary gave a paper on secularisation to which Shurlee Swain and Ian Tregenza responded. The Adelaide papers will be published as a separate volume.

· Theme and organiser for next RHA conference, Wollongong, 2 – 5 July 2013.

· It was resolved not to sponsor a session at the July 2013 AHA, although a call will be put out to members to offer a paper under the aegis of the RHA. Bursaries will be offered to RHD students, and $2000 was allocated to that purpose. The 2014 AHA conference will be in Brisbane and will be a major event. The RHA will sponsor a session on religion and war.

· Protocol for publication of conference special issues.

· Chris Hartney will report on this at the next meeting.

4. Website and Therha (Anna Haunton)

The current website is largely moribund. We will have to change the website provider. The RHA will move to Wordpress and end the present arrangement. This will have to be attended to before the next meeting if we are to align membership with journal subscription

5. Treasurer’s Report (John Gascoigne)

The Treasurer tabled and spoke to his report.

The Journal account with the University of Sydney has now been renewed to the end of February 2013

Total expenditure since the May meeting exceeds income, but the bulk of the money coming to the RHA from Wiley-Blackwell comes in the first half of the year.

6. Editors’ Report (Carole Cusack and Chris Hartney)

The Editor reported another successful year. Since May 36 submissions have been received. Of these 5 have been rejected. The rest are being reviewed.

Special Issues for 2012, 2013, and 2014 have been completed. The 2012 special issue will be on Baha’i. There is a possibility of special issue on eschatology in European vernaculars.

There are still problems with the Singapore branch of Wiley which processes the journal. The supervisor is aware of this problem.

The Editor is attending the NZ religious history conference next week. Explorations on amalgamating the two associations continue, but there are significant obstacles. In 2014 a conference entitled ‘Religious Encounters in the Southern World’ will be held. The RHA will let NZ organise this, but we will be co-sponsors and issue a call for papers.

The Editor had sent out five nominations for the Mansfield Prize for best journal article. The Management Committee awarded the prize to Meredith Lake for her article entitled ‘Provincialising God: Anglicanism, Place and the Colonisation of Australian Land.’

Chris Hartney will attend an Editorial Collective in Canberra in January 2013 to share information on Open Access Journals.

7. Any Other Business

There was none

8. Date and time of next meeting

Wednesday 31 July 2013