ECSAS2021: SPECIAL CIRCULAR

Dear Conveners and Presenters,

We have been closely monitoring the developments of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world, hoping that it would not affect the ECSAS 2020 in Vienna. But in considering the scale of the outbreak in many countries around the globe and its impact on everyone’s mobility and safety, we came to the decision – after consulting with the Full Council of EASAS - that the best way to ensure general participation and success is to postpone the conference for one year, to next summer 2021. Your health and well-being remains our overriding priority.

The new date set for the conference is 26 – 29 July 2021.

We regret any inconveniences and sincerely hope that you will be able to accommodate this change of schedule and be with us in Vienna next year!

We aim at holding the conference by keeping the accepted panels and papers as they are, but we are of course aware that this will probably not be possible in all cases. We therefore ask the panel conveners to kindly confirm that they are still willing and able to convene their panels as planned, and we similarly request all paper presenters to communicate their intention to participate to their respective panel conveners.

The panel conveners are then requested to please provide us a short note of confirmation and to let us know in case there will be any changes in your panel by 30 September 2020, so that we can start working on re-arrangements of our programme as necessary.

We thank all the conveners who had sent us their recommendations for financial support for young scholars. Unfortunately, as the personal financial situations are likely to become subject to change within the course of a year, we will have to repeat the call for travel bursary applications next year. In addition to that the current situation will possibly make it even more difficult for us to acquire necessary means for financial support, but we will do our best to provide support for travel bursaries next year.

Everybody who has already registered for the conference and paid the conference fee will be contacted in a separate email and reimbursed.

The University of Vienna will cancel all existing hotel bookings done over our website – of course without cancellation fees. Cancellation confirmations will be sent in a separate email.

The ECSAS is a members’ conference and so you need to be a member of the EASAS to participate at the ECSAS in 2021. Especially in these difficult times EASAS relies on loyal supporters of the association and the regular payment of membership-fees. We therefore thank the long-term members for their constancy and encourage the new members to remain committed to EASAS. Your membership fee is an important and crucial contribution to our community and South Asian Studies in Europe.

We hope to see you then in summer 2021 in Vienna!

Martin Gaenszle, Birgit Kellner (Conveners)
and the ECSAS2021 Conference Team