Farewell Letter from ISSRNC President Sarah Pike

Dear ISSRNC members,

I write this letter to you as my last presidential task. I have very much enjoyed serving you and will continue to serve on the ISSRNC board as a past-president. I will also continue to be involved with organizing our June 2019 conference in Cork, Ireland, and I hope to see you all there, if not sooner. It is not too early to begin thinking of a paper or panel proposal. See our Call for Papers for this conference on “Religion / Climate / Water.”

Please welcome our incoming President, Mark Peterson, from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. I know Mark will do a wonderful job and that I am leaving you in very capable hands. In addition to welcoming Mark, please join me in congratulating Evan Berry, our new President-Elect, and Amanda Baugh, our new Secretary. I know they will serve the ISSRNC well and we are very lucky to have them. To round out our Executive Committee, Kristina Tiedje will continue to serve as Treasurer. A big thanks to Kristina for her hard work in this important position and thank to all for stepping into these leadership roles!

I also want to congratulate our new Board members: Michael Northcott (University of Edinburgh), Robin Globus Veldman (University of North Texas) and Kelsey Simkins (soon to be PhD student at Ohio State University).

Finally, a huge thanks to our outgoing Board member, Amanda Nichols, who you probably know as the organizational face of our past two conferences. Amanda has taken a new post at the society’s journal, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, and I wish her all the best in her new role there.

We will have another, larger, election coming up in 2019 and welcome those of you interested in running to contact President Mark Peterson, who will chair the Nominations Committee. Meanwhile, please feel free to contact any of our officers or Board members if you would like to be involved in the Society in other ways, such as writing a blog for our website, submitting an article to the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, or joining a working group.

All the very best,

Sarah M. Pike

Past-President, ISSRNC