The Association for the Study of Persianate Societies
انجمن مطالعات جوامع فارسی زبان

Let me therefore first thank Saïd as outgoing President for the energy and acumen he put into keeping the organization healthy and active, for the leading role he played securing on-going funding, and for having steered our journal, the Journal of Persianate Studies, so expertly as its editor, enhancing it prestige and visibility by bringing it under the care of Brill Publishers.

My heartfelt thanks also go the various board members. As Said observed in a previous newsletter, the current board has proven to be the most active ever. I wish to thank in particular Jo-Ann Gross for shouldering the responsibility for the Tajikistan branches of ASPS, for securing continuous sponsorship for the important Central Eurasia Research Fund (CERF), and for managing the same fund. I thank Habib Borjian for his keeping our financial house in good order as well as for his crucial role in organizing the Lahore conference, and Sunil Sharma for his work on the joint publication series with the Miras-e Maktub Center for Written Heritage, Tehran, Sources on Persianate Civilization. Mirjam Kunkler, the outgoing Newsletter and Website Editor, has done a wonderful job taking care of the News-letter and Website for several years, increasing its comprehensiveness and improving its quality and design. I welcome Ghazzal Dabiri of Columbia University who has gra-ciously agreed to be our next Newsletter Editor. And last but not least, Parvaneh Pourshariati deserves many thanks for her hard work arranging the improvement of our payment system on the website. To Shahab Razavi of Georgia Tech University goes the credit of making Paypal work for us. He has kindly agreed to update the website as well.

I acknowledge with gratitude the continuing support we have received from an anonymous source whose generosity has made CERF a thriving component of the ASPS for a number of years now, as well as the sponsorship for the journal from the Soudavar Foundation. My thanks also go to the American Institute of Iranian Studies for its generous support of our 4th biennial convention and to its director, Dr. Erica Ehrenberg, for joining us in Lahore.

We are looking forward to an exciting MESA program in Boston in November, with a quadruple panel on Iran in late antiquity, an unprecedented ASPS-sponsored event organized by Parvaneh Pourshariati. The participants will be honored at the ASPS reception. Our board meeting is scheduled to be held on Saturday Nov. 21, 1:00-2:00, and our business meeting will follow immediately thereafter, 2:00-3:00. I hope all of you will attend to discuss current and future activities, including the next biannual meeting. ASPS will hold its customary reception in the hotel, most likely on Saturday evening, venue TBA.

All paid-up ASPS members should have received vol. 2:1 of the Journal of Persianate Societies. Beyond that, we are looking forward to vol. 2:2, an exciting issue that includes a symposium titled "The Eighteenth-Century Fracturing of the Persianate World" edited by Sunil Sharma and Mana Kia, to be published shortly.

I call upon all of you to help make ASPS an even better organization than it already is, by publicizing its activities, working toward increased membership, suggesting opportunities for continued and expanded fund-raising—a vital though not an easy task in these lean times. We now have Paypal set up on our website, so that payment of dues can now be made easily within a matter of seconds. Just visit www.persianatesocieties.org/main/membership.php and you will see. Finally, I invite all members to think with me about ways to maintain and expand the links that form the heart and the rationale of the organization, between scholars in the West and our colleagues in the various parts of the Persianate world.

—Rudi Matthee