Whether you are working toward the terminal MA at Sam Houston State University or contemplating PhD or MFA work, consider sharing your ideas and writings at any one of hundreds of scholarly or creative writing conferences around the region, country, or world. In doing so, you make a place for yourself in the larger academic and creative communities.

The Larger Academic and Creative Communities:

When you enroll in a class, whether as an undergraduate or graduate student, full-time, part-time, or merely occasional, you become part of an academic and creative community. Ideally you share with others in that community some of the same interests, goals, and collective methods of working toward “truth.”

One of the big lessons you learn in graduate school is that there’s a larger community of scholars and imaginative writers beyond your classes and beyond your particular school, thousands and thousands of them busily at work in the larger state, the larger nation, and the larger world. And these researchers and writers are carrying on conversations about works and authors and ideas and theories and methods of production and transmission that are important to you, too. Recognizing that this community exists and that you’re a member of it is a first big step beyond provinciality. Every time that you do research for a paper, every time that you read a scholarly article or book, every time that you look at a piece of short fiction that you might use as a model, you should be reminded that there are scholars and writers in the larger world carrying on conversations about literature and language in print. But they also do so at professional conferences. They assemble at exotic places like Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota (in fact, a very fine city)—and, of course, New York, Chicago, Vancouver, and London—and present their ongoing scholarship and creative productions, raise issues, share findings, ask questions, challenge assumptions, make arguments, have fistfights about the relative merits of the two Eliots, T.S. and George.

The larger graduate studies program at Sam Houston State University invites students from across the disciplines to participate in an annual research exchange, and the Department of English itself presents a spring Graduate Student Colloquium. So there are possibilities for local conference activity. But as you become more and more involved in the larger conversation about the works and issues, you might consider participating in a conference organized by a state, national, or international group.

What Types of Conferences Are Out There?

A handful of huge conferences like the annual Modern Language Association (MLA), Popular Culture Association (PCA), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) meetings, which number thousands of participants, organize presentation panels on virtually every subject of interest to scholars of literature, languages, and culture: variorum electronic editions of Piers Plowman, intertextuality in The Awakening, the semiotics of body art and street signs, and “reading” the Three Stooges as cultural icons. Of somewhat narrower interest and smaller participation are international, national, and regional conferences held annually by organizations devoted to scholarship in certain academic areas: the American Literature Association, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, to name only a few. There are conferences for rhetoricians and creative writers like those presented by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). Some conferences cater to specific theoretical interests. And there are even some conferences exclusively for graduate students.

You can find out about the international and national societies, their regional affiliates, and the conferences that they present by several means: Ask a professor who is an area specialist about them. Go to an Internet site like the Scholarly Societies Project, which tries to keep tabs on all such organizations (an unenviable mission). Or go to a site that lists academic resources; the industrious Jack Lynch at Rutgers has an excellent one.
Perhaps the most useful resource for you—and one that many of your Sam Houston State University graduate English faculty use—is the online Calls for Papers (CFP) Mailing List, a free subscription service based at the University of Pennsylvania that sends out invitations for paper proposals from all sorts of organizations and individuals. It isn’t a very systematic method for finding out the names of organizations and the conferences they present because it calls for papers randomly. Still, it’s worthwhile subscribing to the service, not only because you might find some leads for presenting the work that you yourself have in mind, but also because you’ll have the opportunity to find out how the winds are blowing in the academic world, to see the kinds of subjects that people are interested in discussing and the approaches to reading and writing that they’re taking.

Your Participation:

Participating in a conference, of course, does not necessarily demand that you present a paper or a creative piece. You might merely attend any number of sessions on any number of interests; in so doing, you find out about the most current developments in scholarship and cutting edge movements in creative writing. Attending conference sessions may inspire you in your own work, may suggest new possibilities for rethinking your ideas, or may give you revolutionary ideas for the classroom.

But if you’re interested in participating more fully in the conversation about works and ideas, consider presenting a scholarly paper or creative work of your own at one of these gatherings. There are great rewards for such a venture: At a conference, you have the opportunity to test your ideas out in a public forum, refine them as conferees ask questions or even challenge your assumptions and conclusions (nothing to be afraid of there), and gain confidence in them. Given these kinds of refinements, a presentation may even lead to a future publication; most professional scholars and creative writers test their ideas out in public fora before sending them out for print. There’s a practical angle for you, too: Conference presentations improve your academic/professional experience and résumé.

Preparing a Presentation Proposal:

For papers presented at regional conferences, the deadline for submitting presentation proposals usually falls in the previous season. For the annual South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, typically held in early March, one might see an invitation for proposals in the late spring or early summer, with a late September submission deadline. At larger conferences, like that held annually by the Renaissance Society of America or the Medieval Institute, the call for the following year’s papers is often issued immediately after the annual meeting ends: Participation in such conferences is much more competitive (sometimes as many as thirty proposals are sent in for a single panel session of three readers), and the organizers face much greater logistical challenges, so they need greater time for coordinating the events.

If you come across an enticing call for paper proposals for a particular session at a particular conference, consider first what exactly the invitation calls for. Sometimes the proposed session is broad enough to include a variety of interests: a panel on medical rhetoric, 19th-century nature poetry, or journal-writing in the freshman English classroom. As such sessions are broader in interest, so they are often more competitive. Sometimes, however, the call for papers is much narrower, aimed at specialists. The 2002 annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, for example, featured sessions on creolization, the digitizing of broadside ballads, and themes of folklore in the American deaf community. So consider as you read the call for papers, first, whether the paper that you would like to present fits the particular subject at all, then whether it does so broadly or narrowly. And look for words that invite papers along certain lines of theoretical or critical emphasis: interdisciplinary, women’s caucus, autobiography.

The calls for papers invite prospectuses, usually with a word limit (ca. 250 words is standard). The prospectus is an abstract of the paper that succinctly sums up the main points, making clear how the paper suits the panel. In the abstract, show the importance of your topic to the interest of the panel specifically and perhaps the conference generally; indicate the methods by which you approach your topic; and make clear your thesis and, in a general way, your line of development for that thesis. The idea is to sell the proposal—so well that it cannot be turned down.

A model proposal follows. This one, written for a session on intersections between medicine and literature in the eighteenth century, proposes a paper on Jonathan Swift’s notorious (and copious) use of fecal imagery in his works. Messy business, but one of your graduate faculty was hardy enough to take it on:

Once More into the Breech: Swift and Excremental Medicine

Abstract

Despite the extensive critical attention paid to the fecal imagery pervasive in Jonathan Swift’s poetry and prose, commentators have, oddly, failed to consider his “aesthetic of excrement” in the contexts of 18th-century medicine and medical psychology. From classical times to Swift’s own, medical practitioners used excrement as both diagnostic tool and cure. For Hippocrates and Galen, the consistency, color, and frequency of stool became indicators of both physical and psychological health; in Swift’s day medical practitioners like Sydenham, Locke, and Cheyne used this “coproscopy” to plot the progress of disease and cure. And individuals like Boyle and Wesley prescribed animal and human excrements for sore throat, colic, cancer, cataract, and baldness. That Swift was well aware of the diagnostic and prescriptive uses of excrement is clear both in the observation of his speaker in A Tale of Tub that “physicians discover the state of the whole body, by consulting only what comes from behind” and in the depiction of various characters in Gulliver’s Travels and elsewhere who ingest or recommend excremental cures.

Swift seizes upon the metaphoric and satiric values of this medical use of excrement in works like Gulliver’s Travels, where a professor in the Academy of Lagado has struck upon a means of discovering plots for sedition and insurrection by examination of the tincture of suspects’ ordure and where Yahoos are forced to ingest their own excrements as cure, a cure that Gulliver, himself a Leyden-trained physician-surgeon, both takes and recommends. But Swift is also interested in the plastic nature of excrements, their form and their “looseness,” a concern stated in the contemporary medical aphorism “Sedes Sanorum oportet esse figuratas” (that is, the excrements of the healthy ought to be “figured”). And his—and his characters’—preoccupant examinations of excrement in figure and in flux become both ways to diagnose the ills of mankind and a locus for Swift’s at once playful and troubling collisions of form and matter, generation and corruption, ideal and “real.”

What Should You Consider in Presenting a Paper?

At the risk of putting the caboose before the engine, you will certainly be able to write a better paper if you can anticipate the circumstances under which you’ll read it. Assuming now that your paper proposal has already been accepted, consider some of the following features of the presentation: presentation formats, your audience, and questions and responses.

Presentation Formats:

Consider any restrictions imposed by the makeup of the panel and the structure of the session.
Guidelines about the length of a paper are usually determined by the number of readers on a panel, typically three or four for an hour-and-a-half session, more rarely five. For the standard three-person panel, each reader has approximately twenty minutes, with another twenty minutes or so for discussion among the panelists or questions from the floor. Make sure that your paper or creative work is manageable within the allotted time—and be respectful of the time allotted for the others on the panel. Most readers find that they have to cut sections of their paper—often, alas, the fun, anecdotal sections—to make the time limit. An eight-ten page double-spaced paper is usually about right. But you should practice reading it a number of times, with a watch in hand. There are variations on the time allotment. At some conferences, each panelist has ten minutes, not to read the paper but to summarize it. The summaries are followed by forty-five minutes of open discussion among panelists and audience.

The usual format for presentation is to read the paper verbatim, although the better you know your subject and the more you practice reading the paper, the better that you can speak the paper rather than merely reading it woodenly.

Your Audience:

Consider your audience at all costs—consider your audience at all costs: The reading audience comprises reasonably well-educated individuals, most of them scholars and creative writers like yourself, who most likely have some interest, broad or narrow, in the panel topic.

First, while the audience usually have the benefit of a conference program and a responsible panel chair’s introductory remarks, make sure that they know who you are and what you are talking about. Don’t take for granted that they know the subject of your paper or the swirling critical controversy that inspired it as well as you do. Provide useful—but brief—contexts, as necessary. On the other hand, don’t condescend to your audience; these are bright, well-read people, most of them seasoned scholars and teachers. If you begin with a lengthy plot summary of Frankenstein, as a conferee at a recent Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts meeting did, you risk great embarrassment and pronounce yourself, in the deadliest of all academic pejoratives, naive and superficial.

In addressing your audience, the customary sorts of personal and verbal skills appropriate to a speaking presentation before one’s peers hold: appropriate dress, good eye contact, absolutely clear enunciation, and rhetorical decorum: Never insult a fellow panelist or member of the audience.

While the usual presentation format is a reading of the paper, knowing the paper very well will allow you to look up every once in a while and engage your audience; perhaps even make an aside or two, so that you’re speaking the paper rather than reading it. Given the sometimes grim circumstances of an academic conference, consider the entertainment value of a good—but appropriate—anecdote or two. The problem is that including such anecdotes is something of a balancing act, since the kinds of asides that might make a paper more entertaining also cut into the precious little time that you usually have for delivering it.

Consider that your audience has a single chance to get your argument. While you do not want to seem simple, keep in mind that the complexity of that argument and the level of language that you use should correspond to the expectations and abilities of your listeners. If you plan to read any quotations—but particularly any that go on for several lines—provide a handout for the audience so that they have something concrete in their hands.

Here’s a great lesson for all who have ambitions to read their papers: At a conference at the University of Houston several years ago, an earnest young assistant professor read a paper on Benjamin Franklin that was so abstruse and convoluted, so meaningful that it was entirely meaningless. He rolled through the paper without ever once looking up from his script. Then, at the end of an unbearably long twenty minutes, he finally looked up, beaming with self-congratulation and stroking his beard, and asked if there were any questions, expecting, we suppose, that the audience would certainly engage him enthusiastically. What followed was—dead silence. Nobody in the audience “got it.” (And in the room were several Ivy League full professors.) Dead silence, until finally someone asked under his breath the question that everyone else was dying to ask: “Did you have any friends as a child?” And this brings us at last to

Questions and Responses:

Be prepared for questions. Alas, this is the part of the presentation over which you have least control, especially when questioners sometimes have their own agenda in asking the questions; sometimes they are really making statements.

On rare occasions, some audience members challenge with an edge; at a recent conference session, for example, an Englishman in the audience took the American chair of the panel to task for his “barbarous” pronunciation of some English names. Usually, however, audience members ask responsible questions and engage in meaningful discussion, in the spirit of scholarly conversation. The best way to prepare for questions from these individuals—the ones who really count—is to know your topic very well, of course, and, as you write, to think through the implications of your subject matter and the thesis, especially as your educated and well-read audience will receive it.

Try to be as polite and succinct in your responses as you can, answering the questions asked and not those hoped for or imagined.

And keep in mind the constructive value of good questions and the ensuing discussion, both of which will help you refine your own argument.

Travel Assistance:

To encourage your participation in conferences and help to defray travel costs, the Department of English and Graduate Studies Office can usually offer some financial assistance. See Travel Assistance for Scholarly Activities.