AD HOC COMMITTEE ON ASOR’S NAME

ASOR members have been discussing the possibility of changing the organization’s name since at least 1982. Most recently, a workshop was offered at the 2018 ASOR Annual Meeting in Denver on “What’s in a Name? Re-assessing the Oriental in the American Schools of Oriental Research.” The workshop was very well attended, and the presentations and discussion were both thoughtful and provocative. As a result, the organizers created a summary of the workshop’s conversations and forwarded them to various governing bodies within ASOR, including the ASOR Board of Trustees. That summary was delivered in Fall 2019.

After considering this summary, the ASOR Board voted, at its November 2019 meeting, to continue the discussion by forming an ad hoc committee to study ASOR’s name.

The Ad Hoc Committee on ASOR’s Name is charged with evaluating whether ASOR’s name is still appropriate for the organization and, if not, to recommend to the Board of Trustees a new name, or a modified name, or some selection of new or modified names that ASOR might adopt instead.

The committee will (1) review previous discussions about ASOR’s name; (2) review discussions other “O” organizations have had about their names and the decisions they have made, for example, the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London; (3) review the experiences of other learned societies that have changed their names or have decided not to, including these learned societies’ discussions regarding the names of their publications; and (4) actively solicit and carefully consider input from the ASOR membership about ASOR’s current name and any possible name change.

• Peyton Randy Helm, Chair
• Lisa Ackerman
• Emily Miller Bonney
• Eric Cline
• Emily Hammer
• Kiersten Neumann
• Eric Welch