Cost Action A36, Tributary Empires Compared

Minutes of the MC meeting no. 4

Date and time: 15 October, 8.00-9.30

Meeting place and address: Warsaw, Harenda Hotel

Chair: Peter Fibiger Bang

Agenda

1. Welcome to participants; taking of minutes
2. Adoption of agenda
3. Minutes of last meeting
4. Report from the Science Officer
• News from the COST Office
• Status of Action
• Number of Signatories
• Budget Status
5. Year Budget planning
6. STSM status, applications
7. Publications, annual report
8. Action evaluations
9. Requests for membership
10. Request for non-COST participation
11. Website news
12. Progress report of working groups
13. Long-term planning
14. Time and place of next meeting
15. AOB

Ad. 1) Peter Bang would take the minutes

Ad. 2) Agenda was adopted

Ad.3) The minutes of last meeting were passed.

Ad. 4) Report from Jie Zhu, COST representative. The most important news was the decision to transfer the administration of grants from the COST office to the grant holder by 2008. Peter Bang would investigate the consequences, pros and cons, of such a transfer.

Ad 5) Assuming an unchanged budget frame, the budget was decided on as follows:

General action support grant  2000 Eur.
1 STSM      2500 Eur.
St. Andrews meeting   20,250 Eur.
Tours meeting     20,250 Eur.

Total       45,000 Eur.

Ad 6) On the MC meeting in Athens, Zeynep Yelce, a graduate student of Metin Kunt, had been granted an STSM to go to London to study with professor Salgrado, a spin off of the Istanbul meeting. In the meantime she had successfully completed the STSM and her report was approved.

Peter Fibiger Bang was granted an STSM to go to Cambridge in the beginning of 2007. The purpose was to work on his comparative studies, to work with Chris Bayly on the publication of papers combined from the Copenhagen, Athens and Warsaw meetings, and with the other members of the core group (all present in Cambridge in the time period) on the development of the second half of the A36.

Ad. 7) Peter Bang and Chris Bayly would now continue to turn papers combined from the Copenhagen and Warsaw meetings into book format. A number of publishers were being explored.
Metin Kunt & Jeroen Duindam were collecting the papers from Istanbul. They would pioneer a collaboration with Brill publishers.
Björn Forsen & Giovanni Salmeri were working on publishing a collection of papers from the Athens meeting, in the series of the Finish Institute at Athens.

In general the action adopted a multi-stranded publication strategy (collaboration with several publishers) in order to secure maximum impact and broadest possible dissemination of results.

Ad. 8) The action was now midway, a meeting plan for the remaining part of the action had been adopted in Athens and the core group should now work out a plan for how the experiences from the first half of the action could be brought to bear on the second half.

Ad. 9+10) No new requests.

Ad. 11) the web-site was running and being maintained by a student assistant financed from the general Action support grant.

Ad. 12) Greg Woolf, main organisor of the up-coming St. Andrews meeting, was unable to attend. But the planning was progressing steadily, a programme would soon be finished and the meeting was set to
30 March- 1 April 2007.

Claire Sottinel had begun working with the core group on the programme for the working group meeting at Tours. The dates were provisionally set to 25-28 Oct 2007.

(Metin Kunt, Jeroen Duindam, Adam Ziolkowski and Antonios Anastasopoulos would join Sottinel in working out the programme)

Ebba Koch would explore dates with the University of Vienna for the working group meeting in Spring 2008.

(Dariusz Kolodziejczyk, Halil Berktay and Claire Sottinel would join Ebba Koch in working out the programme).


Ad. 13) Following the desire at the Athens meeting for one extra meeting, Peter Bang had found out that the action actually had sufficient funding to allow one extra meeting which would then be autumn 2008, postponing the final concluding conference in Rome to spring 2009.

An initial suggestion was made that this meeting would be on empire and law in Utrecht with Jeroen Duindam as main organiser. Other suggestions came up: tribute extraction, religion, architecture. It was decided to postpone decision to the next meeting at St. Andrews. In the meantime, the core group would initiate discussions with the management committee on which topic or combination of topics and which location would be most desirable for the autumn 2008 meeting in order to be able to reach a conclusion at St. Andrews.

With the mid-term meeting now successfully concluded, the action will now enter its second phase. It is important to ensure that the experience and results from the first series of meetings will be brought to bear on the execution of the second half of the action. At this meeting, some members of the management committee were therefore asked to join in the planning of the next working group meetings in order to ensure that programmes were planned so as create a basic continuity with questions addressed by the proceeding meetings. Furthermore, the Core Group would work out a plan before the next MC meeting (preferably circulated to the MC-committee in advance) detailing how the network could ensure that questions and results accumulate and feed into the continuous development of the research agenda.

Metin Kunt raised the question whether it was possible to combine a “summer school” for graduate students with the final conference in Rome in order to secure a long-term effect of the action. It was decided to explore this possibility.

Ad. 14) Next meeting, St. Andrews 1 April 2007.


Peter Fibiger Bang
Chair
1 November 2006