We are delighted to host the 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse at The New School in Greenwich Village—the first time the conference has been held in New York City. This year’s meeting again promises to be an exciting cross-disciplinary showcase of new work by scholars from across the globe. Drawn from over 150 submitted proposals for symposia, papers, and poster presentations, the program represents innovation across a range of interlocking research topics.  Many thanks to this year's reviewers for their hard work and attention to detail, and many thanks to you – the contributors – for making this such a varied and stimulating program. 

Program highlights this year include three significant keynote presentations. Jane Oakhill, 2019 recipient of the society's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, will present an overview of how children's reading comprehension develops; Sidney D’Mello, 2018 Tom Trabasso Young Investigator Award recipient, will present on multimodal computational analyses of discourse; and special guest Eve Clark will present on how conversational repair contributes to language acquisition. Congratulations to Jason Braasch, recipient of the 2019 Tom Trabasso Young Investigator Award, who will speak at next year's annual meeting. We are also excited about the two pre-conference workshop sessions on techniques for pushing our fields forward, one on data visualization techniques that can expand how we think about data in text and discourse led by Parsons Data Visualization program head Aaron Hill, and another on Bayesian alternatives to Null Hypothesis Significance Testing led by Tufts University discourse researcher J.P. de Ruiter.   

The program is jam-packed, but we hope you also find some time to enjoy being at The New School in this its centennial year and to explore its range of distinctive architecture and world-famous art collection. The New School is unlike any other American university, with five colleges (including Parsons School of Design) and a distinctive profile of offerings in social sciences, international affairs, liberal arts, history, and philosophy, as well as art, design, management, and performing arts. Founded in 1919 as The New School for Social Research by a group of prominent American intellectuals and educators seceding from Columbia University (including Charles Beard, John Dewey, James Harvey Robinson, and Thorstein Veblen), the university has been the first on many fronts over the years, from America's first continuing adult education programs to the first university-level courses in women's history and film history, and among the first college-level courses in photography and jazz.  If your schedule allows, please do sign up for one of the two curator-led tours of the university's site-specific art installations, including the world-famous Orozco Murals; if your schedule doesn't allow or there are no remaining spaces on the tours, we'll have a handout for self-guided tours of the installations within the University Center that you can use at any time.

We also hope you'll enjoy at least some of the many cultural and culinary opportunities near The New School, from legendary jazz clubs in the Village to world-class dining (at many price points!) and speakeasy cocktails, to great museums in striking distance with offerings as varied as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Tenement Museum. If you have time and inclination, it can be fun just to wander through the immediate neighborhoods and those beyond, enjoy local parks (Washington Square Park, Madison Square Park, Union Square, and—notable in the wake of the just-finished World Pride celebration—the national LGBTQ rights monument in front of the Stonewall Inn) and stroll the High Line. And of course the full array of New York City's touristic options can keep you busy much beyond the conference. If you are looking for recommendations, we have created the ST&D 2019 - NYC Dining and Drinks guide with some of our favorite suggestions!

Many thanks to Mike Mensink and Kate Bohn-Gettler, without whom this conference could not have happened, to Danielle McNamara for advocating for New York City as this year's site, and to all members of the Program Review Committee for their help. 

All the best wishes for a productive, fun, and safe conference!  (And please make sure to look both ways when crossing one of the many relatively new bike lanes—everyone's still getting used to them).

Michael Schober and Adrian Bangerter
Conference Chairs
29th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse, 2019

Officers of the Society for Text & Discourse 

Chair

Chair-elect

Governing Board

Ex Officio