On November 12, the Dutch government announced another lockdown and it seems like more stringent measures are on the way. The conference organizing committee of NASA had a meeting this week about how to proceed. We talked about two options: do the whole event online or postpone it to a later date, in spring next year. We decided on the latter option, for a number of reasons. First of all, the lockdown in the Netherlands was announced just a few weeks in advance of the conference, giving us very little time to reschedule panels (and avoid parallel sessions) and create a productive online environment for the conference. In the second place, a number of participants indicated they prefer an in-person event and we hope we can do that after the winter period.

Although the conference will be postponed, we still want to go ahead with Megan Black’s keynote on Friday, December 3, as a starting point for a discussion about topics that will be central to the spring conference’s theme: the Environment and American Studies. Here is the link for the keynote titled “The Environment and Global American Studies: The Curious Case of the US Interior Department,” which will start at 2:30 PM Netherlands (CET) time: https://bit.ly/3HU30YO. We hope to see many of you there!