Villains, Rogues and Deviants

A friend (and fellow second-going-on-third year History PhD student) and I have been putting together a one-day conference for postgraduates and early-career researchers to present 15 minute papers, receive feedback and share their thoughts on current scholarship. We began planning this day about 10 months ago, after a seminar for postgrads on funding and CV building. Organising, running and presenting a paper at a conference are all important skill and experience-building exercises in our field, and we left that day determined to run one of our own. The tough part was trying to figure out a theme on which we could both present.

My friend studies Unionism in Ireland and America in a later time period than I study. I study the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire. So we came upon a compromise after recognising that the bulk of the people we study would be considered 'bad people' by today's standards. This opened up a wide range of possibilities. Instead of focussing on slavery history, or Irish-American history, we could open up the conference to anyone researching 'bad' people, groups, or ideas, and those who have been considered good then bad, or bad then good, etc. It also meant that we could look beyond history departments for possible participants, and include students of law, classics, english, politics and so on.

Then came the logistics. We met with several professors to get advice and ran the idea past them. They gave us some very positive feedback, as well as advice on everything from budgeting and funding, to advertising, to the title of the day. We had to come up with a budget, which meant finding out about catering, printing, and estimating how many people we felt we could handle. We put together two funding applications, but as time went on we decided to be brave and send out the Call for Papers before securing funding. Happily we secured the full amount of funding we'd requested from the Edinburgh Trust, a fund supported by university alumni.

The Call for Papers was pretty successful. Over 30 students from across the UK applied to give a paper, inspiring us to double the number of participants we'd originally intended on having, to 12, and shortening the individual papers from 20 to 15. We also secured a keynote speaker, a professor at our university who is studying a relevant topic. Next came a room, initial catering enquiries, a poster advertising the conference, and a webpage on the school's website. Now that the webpage is finally up, I can share it with you here. So if you're interested, check out the details of Villains, Rogues and Deviants: Writing the Histories of People We'd Rather Forget.

Things are starting to get more real, and a bit more nerve-wracking. So far we've found it impossible to get hold of the university's caterers (who have a monopoly -- only school caterers can cater university-based functions). I'm a bit nervous about the day staying on time, especially now that we've got so many speakers, and having to be more assertive about keeping to the schedule and leading discussions after each panel has spoken. It should be great experience giving a paper, introducing speakers, running discussions and keeping the day running smoothly. There's just so much involved that I've more than once told my friend that this planning really reminds me of planning a wedding. She in turn remarked, 'But this doesn't have to happiest day of your life.' Thank goodness!