from Medieval Academy News

On organizing a regional conference
by Phyllis Rugg Brown

Although national and international conferences will always be more prestigious and offer their own opportunities for exchange of ideas and occasions to meet up with old friends, regional conferences nevertheless continue to attract scholars and teachers for a variety of reasons. Their modest size is itself one of their great attractions. Usually drawing between fifty and four hundred participants, regional conferences can be hosted by smaller institutions in more intimate settings. Many smaller regional conferences limit themselves to plenary sessions, giving speakers the largest possible audience and everyone the opportunity to hear all the papers presented. In medieval studies, regional conferences are frequently interdisciplinary, thereby offering participants a means of keeping up with developments in disciplines related to their own. Moreover, because regional conferences are not typical venues for job interviews, attendees are spared the palpable anxieties characteristic of such huge annual meetings as the Modern Language Association or the American Historical Association. In a context often singularly free of such anxieties, participants are more likely to engage in spirited discussion of scholarly and pedagogical issues, drawing on a wide variety of points of view and theoretical constructs and ranging over both canonical and extra-canonical texts.

Since becoming Secretary of the Medieval Association of the Pacific (MAP) in 1998, I have been closely involved in planning for three annual MAP meetings. Reflecting on these interdisciplinary conferences involving three to four hundred participants (depending on ease of access and attractiveness of the venue), I offer the following observations.

The success of regional conferences depends first on faculty and administrations at colleges and universities in the region who are willing to host meetings. After that, crucial are the availability of several people at the host institution to share the workload with the officers of MAP and clear and effective communication among those people. Funding from the host institution allows for more generous refreshments during the conference but it is not essential; on the other hand, the host institution must be able to provide adequate rooms for the sessions, audio-visual equipment (including Internet access) and appropriate accommodations for conference participants, including lower-cost rooms for those with limited or no institutional support for travel to conferences.

Frequently a MAP conference has been hosted by a current or former officer of MAP, as when Nancy van Deusen hosted our meeting at the Claremont Graduate School at the end of her term of office as president. Similarly, our current president, Dhira Mahoney, is playing a central role in our upcoming joint meeting with the Medieval Academy of America and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. Our current vice president, James Otté, will host a MAP meeting at San Diego University during his tenure as president. Other years, however, most recently when Elizabeth Archibald hosted our 2000 meeting in Victoria, B.C., MAP officers have worked closely with MAP members who are faculty at the host institutions to organize very successful meetings.

Institutional memory can be extremely valuable when it comes to planning for a conference. For a relatively small and very friendly organization such as MAP, the journal Chronica, which prints minutes of business meetings as well as the annual conference program, provides an important memory bank; former officers are often even more valuable sources of information. Not content with those sources of information, during our first year in office, the other MAP officers and I wrote Conference Planning Guidelines which we continue to use and revise with each subsequent conference. The main categories of the document are Initial Planning for the Conference; The Planning Meeting; Compiling, Printing, and Mailing the Program; Payment of Conference Expenses; and The Membership Policy. Probably the most important part of the guidelines is the bulleted list of planning items for which individuals must take primary responsibility.

Planning will go more smoothly if whoever has responsibility for compiling, printing, and mailing the program is aware of the challenges of this extremely important task and is clear about what forms of support are available (labor or financial) from the outset. MAP’s experience demonstrates that the program can be prepared either by the host institution or by MAP’s secretary, but misunderstandings about whose responsibility it is in a particular year are potentially disastrous. Furthermore, if the conference planners are clear and realistic about the conference planning timeline and responsibilities from the outset, no one person will be overburdened, and planning will be proactive rather than reactive and crisis-driven.

The personal computer provides invaluable technological assistance in planning for a regional conference. It is essential for each person involved in the planning to have access to reliable e-mail for convenient transfer of information. Increasingly I appreciate submission of abstracts of conference papers in electronic format, since they can then be easily transmitted to everyone on the conference planning committee and need not be retyped for publication in Chronica. Furthermore, when conference participants communicate electronically, information about travel and accommodations can be broadcast to those presenting papers or chairing sessions in advance of the program mailing. This kind of advance notification was particularly important for our meeting in Victoria, since participants needed to be aware of potential difficulties associated with travel to an island off the coast of Canada. The personal computer also helps with the inevitable headaches resulting from last-minute cancellations or changes. More important, it makes innovative collaboration possible in many ways. For example, I was able to choose from several digital manuscript images provided by the local arrangements committee at Victoria for the program cover, and the local arrangements committee could then use the same images for meal tickets at the conference itself.

Hosting a regional conference is a significant responsibility and an important service to the profession. Most unhappy experiences can probably be avoided through careful planning, shared responsibility, and effective communication. Anyone interested in making use of the experience and expertise we developed in organizing conferences is welcome to contact me to request a copy of our guidelines (408-554-4930 or pbrown@scu.edu).

Editor’s note: Phyllis Rugg Brown, Secretary of the Medieval Association of the Pacific, is Professor of English at Santa Clara University, where last year she organized a symposium, Hrotsvit 2000.