EVENT 2024

Sponsors and Fees

Running a successful online conference is expensive; we have unpaid expenses from all of the infrastructure we have put into place for this event: Whova, software purchases (FileMaker Pro, Photoshop), labor, banking costs, and requests for changes to how we originally set up our event. Despite these expenses, we have worked hard to keep central registration fees low. (Each hub has its own low additional hub fee.) If we have 300 regular registrations at $100 and 200 student/contingent at $50, then by the end of EVENT 2024 central registration will have received a total of $40,000. That’s all. RA labor alone will have added up to more than $100,000 by the end of 2024. Regular registration for NAVSA’s Virtual Vancouver conference, by comparison, was around $300. That was caused, in part, by the expense of the Forj platform used for the event (which cost the organizers $35,000). We are building COVE Conferences precisely so that we have a non-profit, NAVSA-owned alternative to expensive for-profit platforms like Forj. All work on building COVE Conferences was covered by external grants: a grant from the Enhancing Research in the Humanities and the Arts (ERHA) program of Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts ($34,500), funds from Baylor University, and a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, part of which was used on the COVE platform.

Not counting the NEH grant, Joshua King and Dino Felluga have secured $183,000 of funding from a variety of sources at Baylor and Purdue to support EVENT 2024: the ERHA grant mentioned above; a Ross-Lynn fellowship from Purdue’s Office of Research to Dino Felluga to support our dedicated .5 FTE research assistant, Monica Wolfe, over the 2023/24 school year; a .5 FTE research assistantship to Monica Wolfe for the fall 2024 semester from Purdue’s Department of English; and significant funding and extensive in-kind support from Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences, including a research assistantship for Harrison Glaze.

Each of the hubs has secured funding for their local face-to-face meetings as well. EVENT 2024 seeks to model a federated, collectivist approach to conference organization. We would like to thank the following entities for direct financial or in-kind support of individual hubs: Baylor University (College of Arts and Sciences, Armstrong Browning Library), Boston College (Center for Centers, Department of English, Institute for Liberal Arts, Irish Studies Program, the John J. Burns Library, the Provost’s Office), Brandeis University, Cardiff University, Concordia University, Georgia State University, Gladstone’s Library, Goethe University Frankfurt, Konstanz University (Zentrum für Kulturwissenschaftliche Forschung), Lancaster University, Miami University Ohio, Purdue University (Blue Sky Lab, English, John Martinson Honors College, Office of Research, and School of Interdisciplinary Studies), Queen’s University Belfast, Saint Louis University, Stirling University (Division of Literature and Languages), Texas Christian University, Texas State University, the University of California Berkeley, the University of California Davis (Global Affairs, Graduate Studies, Office of Research, Office of Sustainability), the University of California Santa Cruz (the Dickens Project), the University of Chicago, the University of Colorado Boulder (English Department, Center for British and Irish Studies), the University of Georgia, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Iowa, the University of Melbourne (Queen’s College), the University of Rhode Island, the University of Washington (English Department, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities), Yonsei University (Department of English Language and Literature, BK21), and York University.