La Vie En Rose for 2007 April 8

My first academic conference was a success and now I am on my way to becoming well-educated and unemployed! First off, my presentation went really well. I did my paper on Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, which I had originally submitted for a women and war panel but I got put on a British authors and war panel, which was fine. Actually as it turned out, all of the authors people presented on were women. There was a paper on West and Woolf, another on Woolf, and the last one on H.D. After another panel I was talking to a girl who had presented and she said, "It obviously wasn't your first conference because you were actively presenting instead of just reading." I said, "actually this is my first!" On the way home I was thinking about it and I started to wonder if she did say "this was your first" because it seriously seemed that everyone else did just read. Some were better readers than others, more expressive or looked up more often, etc, but… and no one else had a handout. So maybe it is only newbies who put so much effort into it. In fact, I was surprised by the number of people who had pages and pages, went on for twenty minutes or longer, using up extra time that magically appeared because someone didn't show up for the panel, and then still having to say, Ok, I'll stop there. How can you not even time yourself? I know it's difficult to cut out text, but surely its better to do it before hand than in the middle of the presentation? But perhaps I too will soon be blasé about these things.

It was mainly an English conference, a few comp-lit people, and there must have been other history students but I didn't meet them. All the same, it was nice to commiserate with people who are more along the same track as I am than those at my school…. "Do they tell you you won't get a job, too?" Someone asked me. Another voiced our greatest fears: "Which is worst, finding out that someone is doing something quite similar to you or realizing the reason no one's done it is because your topic sucks?" I met tons of people from all over, a lot of international students studying in the states, and people coming from abroad too. A girl from Germany and a guy from Turkey studying in Indiana, a girl from Romania studying in Virginia, a guy from Virginia studying in Scotland, and someone coming from Wales who had done he BA and MA at UCL… Actually aside from the UCR people, I'd day there were more presenters from out of state than from within. It was tons of fun to run around all day with these people and listen to interesting papers and pretend to be smart, or if that didn't work I had an excellent excuse because English isn't my field! But actually I was surprised how much I was able to bring in… after our panel there was a good debate about the authenticity of women war writers, and in others panels I was able to comment on subjectivity of sources, etc. One panel I ended up going to I really enjoyed but I was totally turned off by the title when I saw in the program… "Politicized Ascetics," what the hell does that even mean? (rhetorical question.)

All in all I had a really great time, and I wish I could have stayed for the next day but I decided to come home and work, though I haven't gotten as much done as I had hoped I would, I'm afraid! I was so exhausted from the long day yesterday and not sleeping well the night before because I was worried about my presentation, that I slept for 12 hours! And I got home so late… oh well. I do have a lot of work to do, and another presentation this Friday. It should be interested because it is on my topic (the UCL guy was confused as to why I had applied to SSEES when I was working on Vera Brittian! But I'm not) so hopefully I will get some feedback. The next one is a women's studies' conference so who knows who I will meet! I hope this panel is also well attended (British War authors had 15 or 20, the most of any other one I went to, anyway) because I think I would feel bad if no one wanted to come! But it is an interesting topic, Interpreting women's engagement in politics, so I imagine people will come.