Thanks, Jason, for that lovely intro, and hello CAASblog readers … whose numbers Jason and I hope to start ratcheting up as we go.

What I’m hoping to do with this blog is start introducing more member-produced content and turn it into a discussion forum as well as an information board. So I’ll still post CFPs and CAAS news, but I will also start harassing organization members for relatively short posts on subjects of your own choosing — interesting research factoids and updates, issues in American studies in Canada, issues in American studies generally, brief book reviews, points of argument or contention, rants, meditations, queries, concerns … really, anything goes, and I encourage people to respond in the comments section to new posts so we can develop a robust online CAAS community.

If this works out, perhaps we can start reaching out to luminaries outside CAAS for guest-posts — so if anyone is best friends or drinking buddies with Donald Pease or Michael Berube or Martha Nussbaum, or anyone else of that ilk, please let us know so we can exploit, er, employ that relationship to our advantage here. But we’ll start with our own membership first.

Also, you don’t have to wait for me to come knocking at your digital door — if you have something you want to post here, just email me at clockett@mun.ca. If you write for other online forums, send me the link so we can post it here; if the other forums allow cross-posting, we would love to put that up here, too.

And if you have blogs or web pages of your own, please mention this humble site, and consider posting our link … and we will do the same.  I would like to start amassing a list of member links here.

One of the things last weekend’s conference demonstrated to me, yet again, is that CAAS has a rather extraordinary collection of people across disciplines and institutions. It’s sort of a shame we really only rediscover that fact once a year; I kind of think we owe it to ourselves to exploit this amazing collection of people on an ongoing basis.