MESA 2009 Volunteer Panel Chairs

MESA invites members to volunteer as chairs of the put-together panels--the ones assembled from individual paper submissions--at the MESA 2009 annual meeting in Boston.

The program is posted at http://mymesa.arizona.edu/meeting_program.php. The sessions in need of chairs are:

If one of these sessions interests you, please send an email message to Mark Lowder at mlowder@u.arizona.edu and include the session number and title. You may want to have a couple in mind in case your first choice has already been assigned. Positions are available on a first-come, first-served basis, although we do give priority to persons not already appearing on the program elsewhere.

Discussant needed for the following panel:

The Palestinian Novel in Israel: Minor, Minority and National Identity
Organized by Louissa Oburra and Amal Eqeiq

Amal Eqeiq, U of Washington–The Challenges of Writing Nakba in Native Palestinian Literature in Israel/Palestine
Louissa Oburra, Cornell U–Ambivalence and Betrayal: Nationhood and Liminality in the Palestinian Novel
Mustafa Qossoqsi, Arab Psychological Association in Israel–The Pessoptimist, or Literature as a Transitional and
Reparative Space

Requirements to Participate

Current MESA membership and annual meeting pre-registration are required to participate in the annual meeting and be listed in the program. Only persons meeting those requirements will be assigned chair positions. If you haven’t already, you will need to login to myMESA, create an account, and complete your user profile. myMESA is located at http://mymesa.arizona.edu.

Once assigned a chair position, you will be able to login to myMESA and print a letter of acceptance and view the panel abstracts. Panelists are asked to upload their papers to the myMESA system by October 15, where panel chairs will have access to them.

Chair responsibilities: The chair is responsible for introducing each of the panelists, monitoring the time for their presentations, and insuring that the panel ends promptly at the scheduled time. The chair is asked to facilitate the discussion session, not by providing commentary about the papers, but rather by opening the floor to questions for the panelists. Each presenter will be expected to give a 15-20 minute presentation (depending upon how many papers there are on a panel), and each session will last for a maximum of two hours. Because "put-together" panels sometimes include papers on disparate topics that would be difficult to synthesize, MESA does not assign discussants to them.

Please volunteer only if you are certain that you will be able to participate. It is difficult to reassign chair positions as the meeting approaches, and it is a disservice to panelists when a chair cancels at the last minute.

Please direct panel chair questions to Mark Lowder at mlowder@u.arizona.edu. MESA greatly appreciates the services of volunteer chairs!