I’ll start off by saying that I’m bummed that I didn’t get a March post in. That’s what happens when my hope for the March post was content related to my dissertation, and I ended up not writing in that section and I didn’t have another section that I wanted to present in a post. But I digress. So, for this month, I wanted to talk about another part of navigating the academic world: going to academic conferences.
I have been to a number of academic conferences, both for history and for teaching over the last 10 or so years and I have noticed some differences between the two, but today I will be talking predominantly about academic history conferences. All conferences run differently, so please take my experience with a grain of salt.
The more conferences I attend, logically, the more people I meet, so as I continue to go to conferences, I see people I have met before, either at the conference I am at or another group. For example, a friend I met through the Southern Historical Association was at the conference I attended at the beginning of the month, which was an environmental history conference. Something really great about history conferences is that there’s one conference that I go to because of the region I study and another that I attend for one of the types of history that I do, which is environmental history. We all research the same space from different perspectives at the regional conference. At the environmental history conference, we are all environmental historians, but we are from across the world and studying the world.
That brings me to a major difference: I had to adjust to attending history events after attending education conferences so often. When you’re looking at a conference program and figuring out the sessions you want to attend, you don’t always find one aligned exactly with what you’re researching. And that is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that you are probably doing unique research if you don’t see session after session that is adjacent or too close to your research, but it does mean that you have to go to other presentations and see what pieces you can apply, theoretically or methodologically, to your research.
I think my best takeaways from a history conference are often from events that are not the sessions themselves. I will have an interesting conversation at breakfast, a social event, or even like I did this year, with some of the exhibitors in the exhibit hall, and those will be super valuable experiences. I often learn things that way that end up being more memorable takeaways than the things that I picked up in sessions. That being said, I always have notes after every conference panel and session that I attend about how something might relate to my research or something intriguing that I want to look a little bit more into in my spare time. That is always going to be a part of conferences.
As a graduate student and as someone who has been going to academic history conferences since the beginning of my graduate journey as a Master’s student, one of the things I love about going to academic conferences is seeing my personal growth. Every time I go to a conference and am asked about my research, I can articulate it more clearly and succinctly explain the impact of my research. But I can also just “speak the language” slightly better. I can reference books I am reading and know what books people are talking about in conversation. I can be a part of the community, and my confidence in doing that is growing.
Finally, I love academic conferences because when you can get involved in them and become part of a community, you can make that conference as wonderful of an experience for other people as it is for you. For example, I am a member of the Graduate Student Council for the Southern Historical Association, and part of my responsibilities is putting on the graduate student lunch. We invite scholars to talk about different parts of the profession and to build connections. I hope to get involved in the Early Career Caucus with the American Society for Environmental History now that my term with the Southern Historical Association Graduate Council will end in November. Being on boards and serving my professional organizations has always been something I have a great passion for. I have been on the board of the Arizona educational technology association for eight years now, and I am rather bummed that per our bylaws, I have to take a year off of being on the board this coming June, but that’s not going to stop me from being a part of committees and assisting wherever I can, and staying active in the organization.
That is the same with history; it is great to be part of a professional organization because, at least in an academic association like southern history and environmental history, being a member means getting a copy of their research journal, which could be super valuable, but also being a part of the association. I like to do work and be part of communities to dispel the myth that academic history takes place in these ivory-towered silos and that the academics only emerge once per year to present their research at their particular professional organization conference and then slink back into their office to continue working until the following year.
I will also add that even though I did not take advantage of doing this at this particular conference earlier this month, academic conferences are a great opportunity to meet with different book publishers in the exhibit hall. I did this back in November at the Southern Historical Association conference. I spoke to editors from two different publishers about how my dissertation could become my first book and how it might be a good fit for each of their presses. It got my name, face, and research topic in front of the publishers, and I got to see the logistical side of the book publishing timeline, such as when they say they want 100,000 words for a book that includes the footnotes!
Conferences are almost my favorite part of being an academic. There’s something for everyone!
Post Idea Credit: Erica Anne Price, Post Title Credit: ChatGPT
Erica Anne Price 