Notes and Comments

Association News

The President of the American Catholic Historical Association, Thomas Kselman of the University of Notre Dame, has appointed Maureen C. Miller of the University of California at Berkeley and Charles J. T. Talar of the University of St. Thomas School of Theology at St. Mary's Seminary, Houston, to the Committee on the John Gilmary Shea Prize, of which Mary Elizabeth Brown of Marymount Manhattan College is chairman. Dr. Miller will serve in 2005 in place of Augustine Thompson, O.P., of the University of Virginia, who is taking a one-year leave from the committee and will be its chairman in 2006; Dr. Miller will serve the other two years of her term in 2007 and 2008. Father Talar has been appointed for the regular three-year term.

Professor Kselman has also appointed Kenneth Pennington of the Catholic University of America to the Committee on the John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award for a three-year term.

The First Vice-President of the American Catholic Historical Association, James M. Powell, will be chairman of the Committee on Program for the eighty-seventh annual meeting, which will be held in Atlanta on January 4–7, 2007. Proposals for papers or (preferably) complete sessions should be submitted to Professor Powell by January 15, 2006, at the following address: 5100 Highbridge Street, Apt. 18D, Fayetteville, New York 13066; e-mail: mpowell@dreamscape.com. Only members of the Association are eligible to present papers, and no one who will have presented a paper at the eighty-sixth meeting will be permitted to present one at the eighty-seventh.

The next spring meeting of the Association will take place at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, on April 7–8, 2006. Those attending the meeting will be able to view the temporary exhibition entitled "Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection: Objects as a Measure of Reflection on a Catholic Past and the Construction of Self-Identity," which focuses on the continuity of Pre-Reformation art and piety during the "Recusant Era" in England, 1538–1829. Suggested areas for papers are "English Recusants and the Continent," "Martyrology and its Traditions, especially regarding the English Martyrs," "Female Agency, including the work of Mary Ward and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary," and "Early Catholicism in the United States (Colonial Era to the Early Nineteenth Century)." Proposals of sessions or papers on any aspect of the history of the Catholic Church, however, will be welcome. They should be sent by December 1 to the organizer of the meeting, Virginia C. Raguin of the College of the Holy Cross, at her home address, 280 Boston Avenue, Medford, Massachusetts 02155; telephone: 781-391-5793; e-mail: vraguin@holycross.edu.

Symposia, Conferences, Workshops, Seminars

To celebrate the sesquicentennial of the consecration of the Basilica-Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in St. John's, a public symposium on the history of Irish Roman Catholicism in Newfoundland will be held in that city on September 8–10, 2005. At the time of its construction the Cathedral of St. John was the largest Irish neoclassical cathedral in the world. The Archdiocese of St. John's has joined the Canadian Catholic Historical Association in co-hosting a historical symposium that will present illustrated lectures, displays, receptions, plaque unveilings, and the visits of special guests, local, national, and international speakers and dignitaries. More information may be found at the symposium web site: http:www.ucs.mun.ca/~jfitz/sympos2005.html.

Another conference on "Consecrated Women: Towards a History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland" will take place at Cambridge, England, on September 16–17. Spanning the history from medieval to modern times, the papers will focus on these four themes: material culture in the convent, missionary ministry, oral history methodology, and the authorial voice of consecrated women. Guest lecturers will be Barbara Mann Wall of Purdue University and Ann Matthews of the University of Ireland, Maynooth. The program and booking form may be found at the web site www.margaretbeaufort.cam.ac...