Jayne Persian

As you know, our postgraduate representative, Rebecca Fleming, stood down in December after taking up a position with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Rebecca worked with the Executive in the areas of postgraduate grants and information, liaising with bodies such as the National Australian Archives, and administered the Facebook site, which has around 50 members. The Executive would like to take this opportunity to thank Rebecca for her work in this regard. I have acted as the temporary postgraduate representative this year, and am pleased to report that the Australian Historical Association currently has 160 postgraduate members.

The AHA/CAL Travel Bursary Scheme is in its second year. The aim of these $600 grants (and associated mentoring) is to help facilitate the process of converting a conference paper into a journal article with the potential for publication in History Australia. There have already been two articles accepted by History Australia from last year’s postgrads, and a few more in the publication pipeline.

On behalf of the postgraduate community I would like to once again acknowledge the work of the AHA Executive, in particular Erik Eklund who administers the funding, and Penny Russell and Richard White who administer the applications and facilitate the mentoring sessions to be held at the conference.

The AHA-CAL grants are in addition to the prizes already established for postgraduate work, including the bi-annual Serle Award, the Max Kelly Medal and the generous AHA-CAL Postgraduate History Prize. I should also mention that the AHA-CAL Postgraduate Prize has an extended deadline this year of 21 July 2010.

I am very happy to make way for a new Postgraduate Representative to the Executive and would ask that all postgraduates feel free to email and facebook postgraduate issues into the future.

Thank you.