Advice for first-time conference presenters

Here is a truly marvellous blogpost from the thirteenthcenturyengland.wordpress.com site that looks in particular at issues that face first-time conference presenters. The BCUR14 delegates will almost without exception fall into this category, so plead have a look to get a sense of the issues facing the delegates!

In Thirteenth Century England

I’ve been handing out a lot of this of late, so I thought I would centralize it here. Maybe you’re presenting at your first conference, or maybe it’s not your first time but it’s a really major meeting and you lack confidence. Either way, perhaps you should consider these points. Don’t be one of those people who give dire conference papers that everyone remembers for the wrong reasons.

1. It’s a conference paper, not a journal article

These two genres are very different, yet many people – especially in the humanities – treat them as if they are the same. In other words, to prepare a conference paper, many humanities students/academics sit down and write. They produce elegantly phrased sentences of complex construction. They delay the moments of ‘big reveal’, maybe by opening with an evocative quotation or posing a puzzling question that won’t be answered until the…

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