Conferences and conferencing

Yippee! I'm off to the Tales from the Old Bailey conference tomorrow morning (not so looking forward to navigating the Tube in the rush hour, though) for a couple of days of listening to interesting-sounding papers and general schmoozing and catching up with old friends. Curious about the conference sub-title though: 'Writing a new history from below'. I wait to be convinced that this is 'new'. Has this become a seriously over-used adjective in historiography?

More Conferences...

It's probably a bit late, but there might be last-minute places at The Anglo-American Conference: Wealth and Poverty, London, 7-9 July.

Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching 1200-1600, London, 26-27 July.

Textual Afterlife: a conference on the uses and manipulations of texts, St Andrews, 3-4 September (papers on 'Medieval and Early Modern manuscript transmission, reception, revisions, borrowings and printed editions'). E-mail Sally Crumplin or Sumi David, sc42@st-and.ac.uk or sjd10@st-and.ac.uk.

Leviathan to Licensing Act (1650-1737): Theatre, Print and their Contexts, Loughborough University, 15-16 September ('theatre, culture and print in the "long" Restoration period').

Buyer Beware! The Business, Politics and Pleasures of Commerce, Wolverhampton, 15-16 September. Plenty of early modern, especially eighteenth-century, papers.

Looking ahead: CFPs

Foreign Policy, Religious Conflict and Public Discourse in post-Westphalian Europe (1648-1713), Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, 7-8 January 2005. Deadline: 15 August 2004.

Economic History Society 2005 Conference, Leicester, 8-10 April 2005. Deadline: 20 September 2004.

Social History Society 2005 Conference, Dublin, January 2005. Six thematic strands: Cultures and identities; Self and society; Lifestyles and lifecourses; Deviance, Inclusion and exclusion; Production and consumption; Mapping the past. Deadline: 30 September 2004.

Material Cultures and the Creation of Knowledge, The Centre for the History of the Book international conference, Edinburgh, 22-24 July 2005. Deadline: 1 November 2004. (Peter Burke, Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier are all headlined as speakers, which suggests plenty for early modernists.)


Conferences, especially the big ones over several days, can be exhausting. I came across this advice for surviving Bouchercon, the big crime fiction convention, much of which sounded equally relevant to academic conferences...

1) Stay at the convention hotel. This will minimize time wasted on travel.

2) Arrive the day before the con begins. The first day... begins early and you will want to be ready.

3) Scope out the schedule to see what you don't want to miss. ...

4) Pace yourself. B'con is intense and long. You won't see everything and that's okay.

5) Sleep when you can. The days are long and tiring. One hour power naps can really save you. [It's true! But don't forget your alarm clock.]

6) Hang out in the bar, even if you don't drink. Everyone will be in the bar and one point or another.

7) Don't be shy. People are there to meet each other and talk. If you see someone you want to meet, introduce yourself. [Why is this so hard?]

8) Prepare to go home with lots of books. Not only do you get freebie just for showing up [OK, not applicable to academic conferences], there will be tons of books to buy.

9) Please introduce yourself if you see me. I'll even let you buy me a drink! :)

10) Have the time of your life. There is no better company in the world than people who love mysteries. Make the best of it.


Since I'm away for most of two days, that of course means a break from blogging (shock! horror!). See you on Wednesday!