The Conference Rejection Pile

As our readers are probably aware, today is the deadline for submitting proposals for the 2012 S-USIH conference (see the CFP here). 

I am not in any way connected with the conference committee, nor will I be part of the selection process for this year's conference.  I did sign on to participate in a panel proposed by another scholar, so I will wait along with everyone else to find out if I'll have a place on the program this year. 

It's not a sure thing.  The committee will no doubt receive far more proposals than there are slots available, and some very strong proposals will be declined simply for want of time and room.  That reason, or some variant of it, is a common but accurate explanation for why perfectly good proposals don't find their way onto a conference program.  When a conference committee "regrets to inform you" that they could not include your excellent proposal in their conference, they are telling the truth. 

But, as they say, the truth hurts.

How do I know this?  Because last year I proposed a paper that was not accepted for the conference.  It was not a question of whether or not the topic or my approach was interesting or worthy of discussion; it was simply a matter of finding a place for my particular paper on the overall program.

That was the fourth time I had proposed a paper for an academic conference, but it was only the first time one of my proposals had been rejected.  So it really took me by surprise -- my past experience, limited as it was, had led me to expect nothing but one fabulous success after another.  When I got the polite email informing me of the committee's regrets, I did not feel very successful.  I felt awful, and my profs and my colleagues who knew about my project felt awful for me.  I really began to doubt myself as a scholar and an academic. 

It was a tough experience.  I wanted to take part in that conference almost more than I can say.  I was bitterly disappointed not to have a place on the program, and I could not possibly justify the expense of traveling to New York just to attend the conference, though I surely would have enjoyed it.  Eventually, though, I got over my disappointment and was able to put the experience in perspective:  Welcome to academe.

So why am I writing this post today?  Well, for a few reasons.  But before I tell you what my reasons are, let me tell you what they aren't.  I'm not trying to tip the scales of selection in my favor.  First of all, I don't need to.  The proposal with which I am associated will stand or fall on its own merits.  Secondly, even if I were tacky enough to try to do something like that, it wouldn't work.  Now that I have participated in planning, organizing and hosting a conference, I am all the more aware of the complex dynamics and considerations that go into putting even the simplest program together.  These decisions require cooperation and consensus, and once such consensus has been achieved, it is not recklessly abandoned for the sake of one hopeful participant.  In other words, one person's whinging would not a difference make.

Instead, I hope this post can make a difference for readers who may be getting -- or may have already gotten -- unwelcome news from a conference to which they have submitted or will submit a proposal. 

I want to encourage you to not take the decision personally.  A conference committee's decision is not a sweeping verdict on you as a scholar or on your place or plans in academe.  It is a highly contextual decision, a judgment call about one possibility for one small piece of the overall shape of that particular conference program.  If you receive an email regretfully informing you that your paper or your panel was not accepted, this does not mean that you are not doing good work or interesting work.  It does not mean that you are unacceptable as a scholar.  It just means that it wasn't a good fit for this conference, this time.

So, do not take it personally. By the same token, do not take your disappointment out personally on the conference committee.  For the sake of your own equanimity, if not for the sake of professional collegiality, resist the urge to put on your own little off-Broadway production of "The Fox and the Grapes."  No, the people who decided that your proposal wouldn't work aren't clueless.  No, they aren't out of touch with what is happening in the field.  No, they aren't trying to stand in the way of your success.  They are just doing the best they can with the information they have so that they can put together a good conference.

Do not take it personally, do not take your disappointment out on others, and do not give up.  Use the experience as an opportunity to learn.  Go over your rejected proposal and your plans for your paper with a colleague or a mentor and see if you can find a new way to frame the work or perhaps a more suitable venue or opportunity through which to present it.  A rejected conference proposal might turn into a collaborative writing project or a re-envisioned dissertation topic.  In the case of my paper proposal from last year, both of those things might turn out to be true.

The toughest thing to do is to take the risk and put in the effort and put together another proposal for another conference, especially if you're still working on (roughly) the same topic.  That can be scary.  And if you're the one putting the whole proposal together, it's not just your place on the program that's at risk.  All of your colleagues and would-be co-presenters are also counting on you to help them get their work out to a wider audience.   It can be very intimidating to think about facing the possibility of rejection all over again.  If your revised and re-envisioned work gets turned down for another conference, what does it mean?

I don't know.  I'm still trying to figure it out.  I put together a very strong panel for a very big conference, found a well-known and well-regarded commenter and chair, got it all together, sent it off, and waited for the news.  And the news came today, and it. was. not. good.

I'm not tempted for a moment to take my disappointment out on others, but I would forgive my co-panelists if they were tempted to take their disappointment out on me.  I feel so badly for them.  I know it's not my fault; it was our proposal, and we all worked on it together.  But it was my responsibility to shepherd the idea through the proposal process, and nobody regrets the outcome more than I do.

But I'm not ready to give up on my topic or my approach.  Even if I question my own judgment as a scholar (and I frequently do!), I trust the judgment of the historians who have seen my work or heard about my project and have offered their encouragement.  I may feel like I don't know what I'm talking about, but they do.  And they help me remember that I have work to do -- it's important work, it's good work, and I need to see it through.

Even though this blog post started with  me preaching to the choir, it is ending -- as they often do -- with me preaching to myself.  But my guess is that I am not the only reader of this blog who has received or will receive a "we regret to inform you" email from a conference program committee.  And those emails are especially daunting and discouraging for junior scholars.

If you happened to get one of those emails recently, I want to encourage you:  don't take it personally, don't get bitter, don't give up.  Keep working, keep writing, and keep in touch with people who can remind you -- in case you temporarily forget -- of the value that you and others have found in your scholarship.  If it was worth doing before you got the rejection notice, it's worth doing now.

So I preach, and so I believe.

The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective (Call for Papers)

Howard Hotson, Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History at Oxford and President of the International Society for Intellectual History, just called my attention to the isih's 2012 conference, which will be held at Princeton University on September 4-6 and is entitled The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective.

It looks like a fascinating event and should be of interest to members of S-USIH and readers of this blog.

Paper and panel proposals are due on April 16, 2012.  The complete Call for Papers can be found at the above link and below the fold.


The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective
Princeton University
4-6 September 2012

Call for Papers

It is an inescapable fact of contemporary life that the idea of a liberal education, an education that aims primarily at the cultivation of the intellect and sensibility rather than at preparation for a particular vocation, is widely under attack all over the world. In country after country, the idea of learning for its own sake is being swept aside, as institutions of higher education are pressured to devote themselves primarily to preparing students for careers in practical areas. The global membership of the International Society for Intellectual History is in a unique position to illuminate these questions from a genuinely historical and cosmopolitan perspective.
The range of potential questions is vast:

• What role did the ideal of liberal education play in classical Western intellectual culture?
• How did the idea arise in ancient Greece? How was it modified in transmission to ancient Rome?
• Was it fundamental to higher education in the medieval and early modern periods?
• How did it mix and mingle with other, more practical conceptions of higher learning throughout history?
• How did the high theorists of university teaching and research in the nineteenth and early twentieth century develop the idea?
• Have their writings been superseded? If so, how and why?
• What lessons can be learned from the intellectual history of non-western cultures?
• What cultural values and intellectual assumptions have sustained the quest for new knowledge and its transmission to the next generation outside the Western world?
• What forces and agendas are propelling the current redefinition of university learning around the world?
• What prospect is there for reviving elements of this traditional concept in an idiom appropriate to the twenty-first century?

During the conference, a series of distinguished keynote speakers, to be announced shortly, will help determine some of the broad lineaments of the topic, which will be further explored in contributions of two main kinds submitted in response to this call for papers. The first and principal form of contributions will be brief papers relating to the theme of liberal education, scholarship, and their place in society. Papers can concentrate on any period, region, tradition or discipline, including the arts, humanities, sciences, and various forms of professional learning. As well as individual papers, we welcome proposals for panels of up to three papers and a commentator. Individual papers will be twenty minutes long, followed by ten minutes of discussion.

The second set of contributions will be posters designed to draw on the international scope of the Society. The purpose of the posters is to document the various attempts to reform higher education being pursued simultaneously in various countries. As well as brief narratives of major legislative and reform programs and opposition to them, posters should include references to resources for studying the national situation further: news broadcasts, documentaries, serious journalism, academic studies, and legislation itself. As well as displaying the posters and discussing them in a poster session, it is hoped that this material can be collected and archived on the Society’s website as a readily accessible resource.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words for each paper or poster. Proposals for panels featuring a maximum of four papers should not exceed 2500 words. All proposals – for papers, panels, and posters – should be accompanied by a brief CV or biographical statement. Individual contributors are welcome to present both a paper (or panel) and a poster at the conference. All proposals are due 16 April 2012. Decisions will be announced by 1 May. Please send proposals to James Lancaster (james.lancaster(at)postgrad.sas.ac.uk), to whom you should also address any queries.

Why History Matters

Yesterday, at the fourth annual Graduate Student Symposium at the University of Texas at Dallas, Ben Alpers give an incredible keynote address on "The Future of the Humanities." I won't summarize his talk here, but I will summarize the audience response:  Ben rocked the house.  

After Ben spoke, I presented my own paper as part of a panel addressing the theme, "Why the Humanities Matter."  My colleagues Michele Rosen and Sara Keeth did an extraordinary job of explaining the cultural value of translation studies and literary studies.  Then it fell to me -- because I had gladly if somewhat naively volunteered to do it -- to make the case for "Why History Matters."

The actual title of my talk was more elaborate, but it was no more ambitious than the daunting task I had before me:  to explain why the study of history matters to somebody besides me, and to do so while standing next to a particularly formidable American intellectual and cultural historian, Daniel Wickberg, who moderated our panel.

I have my reasons for valuing history as I do -- and I spoke about some of those reasons yesterday.  But the argument that the study of history can enrich one's life -- and it certainly can, and it certainly has -- is not sufficient to explain what history has to offer to those outside the ivied walls of the ivory tower.

What is the cultural value of being a historian?  Why should the academy continue to train historians?  Beyond the self-perpetuation of the profession, what does that get us?

Training scholars to think historically gets us people who can wade into the contentious conversations in the public sphere while retaining -- and modeling -- some sense of irony and perhaps the faintest bit of humility about the limits of one's own understanding. We get, in other words, people who would (ideally) offer a different model of discourse besides the rhetoric of righteous indignation and moral or political absolutism that is constantly swirling around us.

That was the basic argument of my paper.  Keep in mind that I was explaining "thinking historically" to an audience of people who were coming from other disciplines in the humanities.  I used my own struggle to contextualize the radical abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison as a way of framing my discussion.  So here's a slightly revised version of part of my argument, which includes some references to discussions taking place on this blog:

This effort to suspend judgment in favor of understanding is part of what it means to "think historically."  It's hard to do.  But it is a disciplinary and self-disciplinary hallmark of historians.  This professional self-discipline, Thomas Haskell explains, "requires detachment":  the ability to "suspend or bracket one's own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers,...to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to imagine how the world appears in another's eyes, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally."[1]  And, I would argue, the most unnatural perspective of all is to recognize that our own mental conception of the world -- whether it's the idea that slavery is wrong, or the idea that historians ought to approach their subjects with some measure of detachment -- is not a timeless truth; our moral and mental conceptions are ideas, and they too have a history of their own.

Keeping the history of our own mental framework in mind even as we write history practically forces us to embrace some sense of disciplinary humility.  We do our best work when we keep front and center "a conception of the limits of historical knowledge."[2] Instead of a totalizing grand narrative, or grandiose explanatory claims, historians attentive to the limitations of our own discipline would (ideally) write, Allan Megill suggests, with a "greater humility and reflexiveness with regard to the interpretation of the past" -- a "self-ironic style."[3]  This is the practice of history as a sort of tonic of humility -- an ironic self-awareness that we must not be self-righteous in our own certainties.   

Irony. Humility. Detachment.  This is what history has to offer. 

This is what history has to offer?  Oh, how the mighty have fallen!  But it is, I would argue, a fortunate fall -- though not all historians have made the leap.  Indeed, one of my colleagues on the U.S. Intellectual History blog is concerned that I seem to have lost a sense of the heuristic purpose of doing history:  to draw from the particular circumstances of the past some generally applicable principles for the present.  "Isn't that part of how we learn from history," my colleague asked me in a recent blog comment, "learn to avoid the mistakes of the past? Or," he continued, "are you a postmodernist such that you see these applications as overwrought with hazards? How do you talk truth with those who come to history seeking SOME limited universal truths? How do you sell historical thinking if you disallow present applications?"[4]  It's a fair question.  After all, I had been saying there -- and I am saying here -- that "when history veers into a discussion of what is true in a transhistorical or 'timeless' sense, it ceases to be history."[5]

Indeed, "timeless" and "historical" don't really go together. 

Instead, what history can offer is a careful, attentive, thick if not thorough interpretation of a particular past context.  The point of such interpretation is not to distill some lesson that will help us "avoid the mistakes of the past"; because time is on the move, the mistakes of the past are unrepeatable.  That's one of the implications of contingency:  each present moment is the product of innumerable choices made and chances taken by others.  So history can't repeat itself; we are wonderfully free to make new mistakes now.  How's that for a liberated future? 

That's a very liberated future.  In his famous -- and much assigned -- essay, "The Burden of History," Hayden White describes how foregrounding contingency frees up the future.  History has the "special task" of bringing people to "an awareness that their present condition was always in part a product of specifically human choices, which could therefore be changed or altered by further human action."[6]  As George Cotkin affirms, "we are born into structures of power and culture that constrain us.  But, at the same time," he continues, "we retain a degree of agency that may assimilate or change those structures to varying degrees."[7]  Intellectual history in particular foregrounds the way that such structuring ideas shape not only the world that people are born into but also the very conceptual limits of how they can imagine reacting against that world.  Grasping this dynamic -- getting some sense of the sheer weight of what people have to wade through to ever think differently about anything -- makes it easier to view individual people, past and present, with less judgment and more understanding.

...

So our job as historians is to speak to our time, to speak to our culture, by speaking faithfully about the past.

The historian's task is simple:  to reconstruct a moment, or a series of moments, from the past, and to hold that past up to view not so that we might commend or condemn it, but so that we might understand it.  That exercise -- the demonstration of how to suspend judgment in favor of understanding -- repeated again and again, defines both the process and the product of history faithfully practiced.  Leading others through that exercise with us is the pedagogical, the scholarly, and -- in a certain sense -- the pastoral work of  secular historians.  We must leave to our historical subjects the harsh and uncompromising and proudly immoderate rhetoric of moral absolutism.  Let Garrison thunder like a prophet, and let us hear him in the context of his time.  Ironically, in the context of our time, to demonstrate ironic detachment and some sense of humility about our own habitual [historical?] certainties is, in its own way, profoundly prophetic.

--------------------
[1]Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory, Vol. 29 No. 2 (May, 1990), 132.
[2]Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 56.
[3]Megill 186.
[4]Tim Lacy, March 15, 2012 (10:35 a.m.), comment on Tim Lacy, “Tim's Light Reading (3-15-2012): Gretel Adorno, Richard Theodore Greener, Ontics, Defending First Principles, and Tony Judt via Jennifer Homans,” U.S. Intellectual History, March 15, 2012, http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/03/tims-light-reading-3-15-2012-gretel.html.
[5]L.D. Burnett, March 15, 2012 (9:15 a.m.), comment on Lacy, "Light Reading (3-15-2012)."
[6]Hayden White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1966), 133.
[7]George Cotkin, "History's Moral Turn," Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, No. 2 (April 2008), 305.

Family Reunion OR next week's OAH in Houston

I just started perusing the schedule for next week's OAH (my first!) and saw that there is going to be a "State of the Field: Intellectual History" with panelists Charles Capper, Nicole Eustace, Jeffrey Sklansky, Joan Rubin, and James Kloppenberg. It is scheduled for the Friday 10:15-11:45am time slot. I have an appointment at 10:30 that day, so I'm not sure if I'll make it to that panel, but I was thinking it would be good for whoever is there to have an informal USIH lunch afterwards. Just keep it in mind.

Also, use the comments for any OAH-newbie advice. How is it like other conferences? How is it not?

Family Reunion OR next week's OAH in Houston

I just started perusing the schedule for next week's OAH (my first!) and saw that there is going to be a "State of the Field: Intellectual History" with panelists Charles Capper, Nicole Eustace, Jeffrey Sklansky, Joan Rubin, and James Kloppenberg. It is scheduled for the Friday 10:15-11:45am time slot. I have an appointment at 10:30 that day, so I'm not sure if I'll make it to that panel, but I was thinking it would be good for whoever is there to have an informal USIH lunch afterwards. Just keep it in mind.

Also, use the comments for any OAH-newbie advice. How is it like other conferences? How is it not?