Conferences

First of all, I have to apologize for my hiatus from writing. Though I assume almost everyone who reads this blog knows me well enough to know why, I'll just reiterate: I was on a "business trip"! Now, I say "business trip" because Princeton paid for everything, and because the main motivation for what I did was to attend two conferences (one of which I presented at), to speak to my advisor in person (at the first conference and also in Princeton), make quick use of Princeton's library and printing services (since the ones in Paris aren't very good), and then go home. The reason for the quotation marks is that I got to go to some of my favorite places (Baltimore, Princeton, NYC), visit with some wonderful friends, get Idina Menzel's autograph (!!), have a very fancy dinner with my mother, present in a tropical climate (San Juan is a strange choice of venue for the Nineteenth Century French Studies yearly colloquium, don't you think?), and have an excellent excuse to visit family in Ponce, Puerto Rico!

I don't want to get too much into the details of conferences, but going to two of them really put the whole ideas of conferences into perspective for me. While it is absolutely necessary nowadays for graduate students to attend a certain number of these things, they can sometimes seem like a waste of time. You spend months working on an innovative research project, try to boil the important points into 20 minutes of talking time, and then get almost no feedback after travelling to a faraway place to present to important strangers. But, I guess you get two lines on your CV. The stark differences between both conferences really underlined the overall use you can get from certain conferences, and what you lose. 

Conference #1: A two-day colloquium on translating constrained literature at Johns Hopkins. Now, I only got to attend one day of this, but it was extremely interesting! Especially for me, since I study all this. Even though I don't study translation per se, attending a conference with a whole batch of OuLiPo specialists (and even the president of the OuLiPo, Paul Fournel!) was extremely useful to me. It updated me on current OuLiPo scholarship, but also gave me a new perspective on the notion of constraint from the translation angle. Also, I was able to attend a conference at my undergraduate institution and reconnect with my old professors. All in all, definitely worth the extra six hours of driving while jetlagged. 

Conference #2: The NCFS is a yearly conference, extremely huge and important to see where the current scholarship on 19th century French literature is heading. The most important 19th century experts attend, and there are hundreds of talks you can go to. But the conference is too big! There are four talks in each panel, which are only 1.5 hours long. That means that if all goes perfectly, there is exactly 10 minutes left at the end of the presentations for questions. But in practice, it never works out that way. Academics like talking a lot, and 20 minutes doesn't allow them to demonstrate the true depths of their research. In order not to be perceived as cutting corners, they overshoot the allotted time, and then, before you know it, there is no time for questions. To a graduate student attending, this really defeats the purpose: without feedback, all the work, money, and time was for nothing. This conference was especially expensive to be useless to graduate students, most of whom don't come from universities such as Princeton with very large conference funding available to graduate students (I received funding from my department and from the Dean's Fund for Scholarly travel, a total of about $1,800 in total). How is someone from a PhD program that isn't even paying them well and that doesn't offer travel funding going to attend this conference on an island far away? And then, if you do manage to go (since, if you study 19th century at all, it is, as I said, the most important conference of the year), you don't even get asked any questions. 

Overall, I think conferences can be productive when they're smaller and more focused. But those conferences are not inclusive. The larger ones generally have a blanket theme (the NCFS was "escape" this year—appropriate, no?) and a huge number of unrelated talks. The smaller ones allow every participant and attendee to interact and connect with one another (obviously, socializing is a major part of these); the larger ones tend to act as a big reunion, allowing scholars from across the country to reconnect every year over overpriced dinners in mediocre hotels. Universities pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to fund travel to these conferences, and the host university must also spend even more to make it all happen. In the end, what do we have to show for all the work? Humanities in academia are in a state of crisis right now, mostly because no one thinks we do anything useful. Perhaps continuing this tradition of expensive cocktails in exotic locations might not be the best way to convince the world that we are providing a necessary service. But at this stage, at least I can enjoy the ride!