I am honored to be your incoming President and excited to welcome back our Executive Board, as well as all new and returning members who are going to serve our academic association over the next mandate. Please join me in welcoming our Past President Noemi Marin, our Secretary-Treasurer, Christene D'Anca, and our two new members assisting our current Executive Board: Szidonia Haragos as Research Executive and Ioana Unk as Research Assistant. It is my pleasure to welcome back Lenutsa Giukin and Adriana Cordali, our RSAA Journal's tireless editors, as well as thank Ileana Marin, who just joined the Journal's Editorial Board.

Our Romanian Studies Association of America is an Allied Organization affiliated with the Modern Language Association (MLA). The Executive Board and Research Assistants worked together to submit three research-session proposals to the 2022 MLA Annual Convention that will take place in January 2022 in Washington, D. C. As always, look for our Calls for Papers on our website, Facebook page, and Twitter account, as well as H-net. We are warmly inviting your participation in any of the three MLA sessions and will work hard to make the three panel proposals a yearly tradition. Thus, we will strengthen the Romanian Studies presence at the MLA, and offer the opportunity to more of our members to gain visibility and experience from working with this prestigious organization.

During my mandate (2021-2023), I will work on expanding our activities and visibility on several fronts. To begin with, we will have a modernized website (ready to being launched as I write), a project that was initiated by Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru and Noemi Marin, our Past Presidents. Lenutsa Giukin will also launch a new RSAA Journal page. A project dear to me is a rapprochement between the RSAA and the main higher education institutions in Romania. More concretely, in terms of extending the opportunity to outstanding Romanian scholars to benefit from Visiting Research opportunities in the United States. The RSAA fulfills the significant role of initiating and mediating the possibility of inter-university research exchanges. We are hopeful that the forging of these special academic relationships - both institutional and personal - between the Romanian researchers and their American and Romanian-American counterparts will prove highly beneficial to all parties involved. Another initiative that I am excited to be working on is the launching of a monthly Book Talk series. This series is primarily designed to disseminate the published research of scholars of Romanian Studies in the United States, Romania and Moldova.

I have even more thrilling news! The Literary Translation Fund of the RSAA that I just proposed will support the translation of two major literary works of Romanian literature into English. Donations made after my appointment make this translation support fund a wonderful project that we intend to transform into a permanent one. Keep your donations coming! We are committed to putting them to very good use and keep you informed about the results. Your donations also make possible for us to offer financial support to advanced Graduate Student researchers who wish to attend major conferences and present their Romanian-inflected research. Since the Humanities is well-known to be generally underfunded, our graduate students can truly use all the support they can get.

We will continue to maintain and extend our affiliations with academic and cultural institutions and organizations that support our mission. To offer a few examples here, we collaborate with the University of Bucharest for the AICED Annual International Conference of the English Department, where RSAA-sponsored panels have been part of since 2017; the Society for Romanian Studies (SRS); the American Romanian Cultural Society (ARCS); and with the Modern Language Association, as we have been affiliated for over 45 years with this important academic organization.

I want to extend a special Thank You to our Past President, Noemi Marin, for her leadership and mentoring of younger leaders and colleagues in the RSAA by offering constant guidance, operational support, and versatile strategies for developing the RSAA further. I thank our Journal Editor and co-founder, Lenutsa Giukin, whose deep, unwavering commitment to the RSAA Journal has been crucial since its very beginning. I also want to express RSAA's immense gratitude to our generous donors and sponsors, since the activities we are currently developing would not be possible without their support.

I look forward to serving the Romanian Studies Association of America as President, but I’m humbled too, especially considering the many inspiring and tireless leaders who have kept this academic association running ever since the 1970's. I encourage you to send us your ideas about every existing or developing initiatives. Your enthusiastic involvement is as much welcomed and cherished as it is necessary. If you have suggestions, contributions, criticisms, or words of encouragement, please do not hesitate to write directly to me at slivescu@ucla.edu, or to our official e-mail address.