Detailed information about the conference, including hotel and registration rates, travel suggestions, and the program schedule, can be found here.

General Background:

Our conference hotel will be the historic Skirvin Hilton, a spectacular Art Deco edifice that has housed cattle barons, movie stars, and even a notorious sexually voracious ghost named Effie (male visitors are cautioned to carefully guard their vartue!). After decades of neglect, the Skirvin reopened its doors in February 2007 after extensive restoration work and is now more glamorous than ever.

Conferees will converge upon a number of local landmarks:

Cocktails on the roof of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, an ultramodern structure built around a 55-foot glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly (in fact, the museum has an entire wing devoted to its permanent Chihuly collection). Downstairs, admire Roman Art from the Louvre. Organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Musée du Louvre, this traveling exhibition represents the largest number of loaned pieces from the Louvre for any single show, and the OKCMOA will be one of only three U.S.venues.

A tour of the grounds of the Oklahoma City National Memorial, a tranquil and beautiful setting built on the site of the Murrah Federal Building. Commemorating the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, this monument was considered as a possible model for a similar memorial on Ground Zero in New York City.

A plenary banquet at the top of the exclusive Petroleum Club, the highest building in the city and the favored haunt of high rollers in the oil and gas business. Drink in the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the OG&E Room (Oklahoma Gas and Electric) as you dine on Oklahoma prime rib and enjoy a presentation by Richard Serrano of Rutgers University on “Ancient Feelings & Incomplete Journeys: A Chinese Woman Poet at the End of the Eighteenth Century.” In the summer of 2007, Professor Serrano returned from China with a sheaf of research notes and a hard drive full of images to illustrate this lecture.

Within easy walking distance of the conference hotel you will find a number of other attractions, including the Myriad Botanical Gardens, a lovely place for an early-morning stroll or jog, and Taylor News and Books, an amazing collection of newspapers, magazines, and miscellanies both national and international … and your source for an eclectic variety of Blue Bell ice cream treats.

MWASECSers will also be invited to a presentation and performance by faculty from the University of Central Oklahoma ’s prize-winning opera department.