Proposing your work for an ASEH conference

By Betsy Mendelsohn, ASEH 2007 Program Committee

Your original research and writing is unique, but to reach a broad section of ASEH conference participants, it should address a particular topic or question of more general interest. From the program committee's perspective, it is much more confidence-inspiring to review a session proposal than an individual paper proposal. First, the organizer of a session has conceived of a broader topic or question. With 4-5 people on board in a session proposal, the program committee feels confident that the session will appeal to many conference participants.

Second, the organizer of a session has pulled together individuals who share their expertise and interests. Given the diversity of inquiries in environmental history, it is unlikely that a member of the program committee shares your interests. The proposer of an individual paper may be unpleasantly surprised by the session that a program committee creates for them. A conference constituted of sessions organized by members, rather than by the program committee, is more intellectually coherent.

Fortunately, the lone historian can network to find colleagues who wish to constitute a session. After defining the central theme or question of a session, session organizers may use email lists such as h-environment, h-sci-med-tech or envirotech to find collaborators. The organizer may go "top down" or "bottom up": either identify a senior scholar who will comment and then attract presenters, or trawl for presenters and then ask a particular senior scholar to comment. The program committee may be happy to round out your session: just ask (early in the process).

Sessions therefore get formed by networking among people known to the organizer or by using email listserves to find people new to the organizer, such as junior scholars or historians far from home, who yet share an intellectual curiosity. ASEH is democratic in its practice of ignoring the status of presenters, as graduate students, adjunct faculty, independent scholars, or full professors, in the text of its conference programs. Instead, we focus our attention on the titles of their papers: in our new-ish and dynamic field, intellectual curiosity is most important.

The session organizer has an important administrative role. Members of the program committee volunteer for one year to spend long hours reviewing proposals and scheduling the conference to avoid conflicts. Session organizers reduce the number of individuals with whom committee members must communicate: instead of 400 individual presenters, the committee communicates with only 80 session organizers. This means that organizers, from the period June through the following April, must stay in contact with the chair, commentator, and every presenter of their session. The organizer must be available to the program committee and responsive to its requests for information, including audio-visual requests, double-checks of names, and updates on contact information. Session organizers who do not accept their administrative role place a large, and often untimely, burden on program committee members.

Finally, the Baton Rouge conference is an expression of the curiosity, creativity and energy of about 70 individuals who proposed sessions, and 10 additional who agreed to serve as organizers of sessions that the program committee created from the many single paper proposals received. The committee believes that we received so many individual paper proposals because new people want to be part of the ASEH conversation, yet are not networked enough to create sessions through colleagues known to them: ASEH may be in a phase of growth, especially among non-United States historians. This particular conference also reflects the generosity of about 30 historians who were drafted in October to chair or comment on sessions, or to recommend colleagues who could serve in these roles.