The 2020 annual meeting of the History of Science Society was planned as a joint event with the Society for History of Technology (SHOT), to be held from 8 to 11 October in New Orleans, a city known for its unmatched joie de vivre and a substantial cultural and economic presence that belies its precarious environmental and social realities. The high number of 675 abstract submissions and over 90 accepted sessions for HSS alone attested to the attraction that the joint endeavor in NOLA had for our community. With 32 joint sessions (25 organized sessions and 7 roundtables), the exciting program developed inMarch and April 2020manifested a shared enthusiasm frommembers of both societies to explore productive overlaps. The rapid spread of the COVID pandemic then forced us to venture into new ground. By June 2020 it was clear that an in-person meeting in NewOrleans was impossible. For us, the program co-chairs, this meant that we were to prepare two programs in one year. Working remotely on a program for a joint annual meeting with SHOT was only the first big and time-consuming challenge. Switching gears for going virtual required reenvisioning a new proposal, program, and implementation. The resulting HSS and SHOT 2020 Virtual Forum, which ran from 8 to 10 October, was not meant to replace the in-person meeting we had planned with SHOT in New Orleans. Our Society’s first virtual event aimed to reflect the agenda of a joint endeavor with SHOT; but, at the same time, it was a truly different, and much smaller, gathering developed in summer 2020 amidst unsettling political tensions, racial reckoning, and an accumulating health crisis. In response to these circumstances, the Virtual Forum was designed to speak to the current moment, discuss themes of broad interest, and address urgent matters that affect our members and society at large. The regular in-person joint annual meeting with SHOT was postponed—it is now to take place in New Orleans in late November 2021—and everyone accepted to the 2020 meeting has received instructions about their options to present in the coming year. Planning the Virtual Forum was done by way of a new ad hoc committee. Headed by us, as program co-chairs, and Karen-Beth Scholthof, chair of the Committee on Meetings and Programs, the Virtual Forum Committee brought together representatives of the Executive Committee, the Council, the Committee on Education and Engagement, the Committee on Technology and Communication, and the Graduate and Early Career Caucus. Our special thanks go to Luis Campos, Jean-François Gauvin, Gwen Kay, Sarah Naramore, Sarah Pickman, Kathleen Shephard, Karen Rader, and Sara Qidwai for their invaluable advice and energetic support. The Virtual Forum Committee’s composition was crucial to making the meeting a success. We experimented with a lot of things: a new schedule with shorter sessions and longer breaks between each of them; a virtual platform; a new selection strategy that asked organizers of some of the sessions initially chosen for the 2020 program to refine their proposals for a virtual format; a focus on roundtables that addressed themes of broad interest; a new format to honor the Sarton Medal winner by way of an hour-long conversation; the “Authors’ Pitch” for book presentations produced by authors themselves; and, finally, new sessions organized by HSS constituencies that brought together many different voices throughout HSS and put the future of the Society at center stage. To capture some of the spirit of in-person meetings, we included Happy Hours in the

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsRobert J. Spear. The Great Gypsy Moth War: The History of the First Campaign in Massachusetts to Eradicate the Gypsy Moth, 1890–1901. xv + 308 pp., illus., bibl., index. Amherst/Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. $35.95 (cloth).Christine Keiner Christine Keiner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 97, Number 3September 2006 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/509993 Views: 11Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.