Pinter was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Kragujevac. On 23 June 2008, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Cambridge, in absentia. On 11 December 2008, the press media reported that Pinter received an honorary degree (an honorary fellowship) from the Central School of Speech and Drama (CSSD), in London, also in absentia, as he "was forced to withdraw from the [honorary degree ceremony] event due to illness." In October 2008, two months prior to his death on 24 December, Pinter also became honorary president of the Central School of Speech and Drama, a constituent college of the University of London, and received his 20th honorary award, from that institution, on 10 December 2008, in absentia because of illness. Harold Pinter Society In 1986, at an annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Steven H. Gale, who became the organisation's first president, brought together several American academic scholars to form The Harold Pinter Society, which later became an Allied Organization of the MLA and an Associated Organization of the Midwest Modern Language Association (M/MLA). The Pinter Society is international in membership and scope, according to the masthead of The Pinter Review and the Society's Webpages (home page). According to the website of the International Pinter Society, its members are "dedicated to studying, celebrating, and appraising the works of this prolific and frequently enigmatic writer" (home page). As an MLA Allied Organization, it organises "a business meeting, programs in which scholars present papers, and related social events at the MLA annual convention." The home page also lists the officers of the Society: President Ann C. Hall (Ohio Dominican University); Vice-President Mark Taylor-Batty (University of Leeds), who designs and maintains the Society's website; and Treasurer Judith Roof (Rice University), who edits and distributes its newsletters to an electronic subscribers' mailing list. The most recent newsletters can be downloaded from the Society's website. The Pinter Review Members of The Harold Pinter Society and individual and institutional subscribers receive The Pinter Review, whose founding co-editors are Francis Gillen (University of Tampa) and Steven H. Gale (Kentucky State University), an academic journal first published in conjunction with the Pinter Society by The University of Tampa Press in 1987. The Pinter Review became a collection of Annual Essays in 1989 and then a biennial book publication of Collected Essays in 1997 and 1998; it