Most important decisions taken by the Board of ESSE during its meeting on 5th and 6th September 2025, in Valletta, Malta
1. The Board of ESSE elected the new ESSE Treasurer, Professor Angelika Reichmann, from Hungary, and the new ESSE Secretary, Professor Martina Domines, from Croatia, for a three year period. Their term of office will begin on 1st January 2026.
2. The Board of ESSE strongly reaffirmed its commitment to promote research and to support activities aimed to help both young and established researchers. The Board decided to:
- continue with the Bursaries for research trips as well as the Bursaries for Gender Studies within English studies for 2026 and appointed a Bursary Committee for 2026.
- continue with the Book and Resources grants, extending this research support scheme to enable applicants to gain access to resources other than books, for example, specialized online databases, corpora, library collections, etc.
- continue with the Doctoral Symposium in both conference and non-conference years and, for the conference year 2026, to offer funding to help eligible doctoral students in need of support to participate in the Doctoral Symposium that will be held together with the ESSE-18 conference in Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
- continue with two special research support schemes for national associations with tight resources to co-fund the accepted parallel lecture speakers from their national associations for the ESSE conference, as well as to invite plenary speakers from other national associations to their own national conferences, and to cover their travel expenses.
- continue with the fee waiver support for ESSE members to attend the ESSE conference to be held in Santiago de Compostela in 2026.
3. The Board of ESSE accepted the report of the ESSE-18 Academic Programme Committee and endorsed its selection of plenary lectures, parallel lectures, seminars and round tables proposed for the ESSE-18 conference in Santiago de Compostela in 2026. The call for papers will be published on the ESSE website by October 2025.
4. The Board of ESSE appointed the evaluation committees for the ESSE Book Awards for 2026. The call for submissions will be published on the ESSE website by October 2025.
5. The Board of ESSE agreed to adhere to the rule established at the Board meeting in 2019 to have only one date for membership updates per calendar year. Fees will be collected according to the membership lists sent to the ESSE Treasurer by 15th November of the current year. Members whose names are included in these lists will be able to apply for ESSE privileges the following year, such as ESSE Bursaries, ESSE Book grants, ESSE Book awards, and conference fee waivers. The only exception will be the ESSE Doctoral Symposium, for which different rules apply as specified in the Symposium announcement.
6. The Board of ESSE accepted the bid of the Istinye University, Istanbul, Türkiye, as the venue of the ESSE Board meeting and ESSE Doctoral Symposium in 2027.
7. The Board of ESSE decided that ESSE is withdrawing from social media platform X, as the values exuded by X’s owner can in no way be reconciled with those of ESSE. ESSE strives to bring people together rather than divide them, and foster understanding rather than conflict. ESSE can still be followed on Facebook, Bluesky and LinkedIn.