Category Archives: conferences

>Happy Thursday

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In the world-weary words of everyone’s favorite homosexual Disney villain; “Life’s not fair, isn’t it?” (Scar, by the way folks.  Scar.  The Lion King.  Yea, I know, figuring he was gay was a mind-blowing event for me, too).
I very frequently describe my workload as an ocean.  It is vast, uncountable, uncontainable, and the best I can ever hope to do is tread water within it.  At a certain point in the semester, this treading water becomes strategic drowning.  Where can I take a break?  How long can I hold my breath?  Where do I really need to break the surface, how much is that going to take out of me, and in the long run will the effort to do so equal the greatest rate of return?
Generally, this feeling begins right around midterms time.  If I’m lucky, I can keep it at bay until I begin research for my finals.
Well I’m two weeks out from midterm number one and already I’m gasping for air.  I blame the common reading exam.  You see, usually when my work is done for the week I have a few hours with which to relax with the knowledge that I have nothing to do (unless I want to be an over-achiever and start on next week’s reading).  With the exam, however, all that time is diverted into (gasp) more reading.  It never ends.  As soon as I think I’ve caught a break, another wave comes by and shoves me right back under the water.
So I’m tired.  And stressed.  And my brain feels like oatmeal (maybe with little chunks of bananas because there are still a few bits that haven’t liquefied yet).  I’ve started getting the stress-headaches and all the wonderful things that erupt from them (tired eyes… migraines with aura are AWESOME let me tell you), my traps feel like someone stuck a fist in them and clenched and has refused to let go, and of course there is the ever-lurking threat of becoming sick yet again.
With that in mind, I’m having trouble being coherent this week.  Here’s a list of random stuff that has crossed my desk recently.
1)    I’m reading Northanger Abbey for aforementioned Best Professor Ever’s Gothic class.  I love this book.  I LOVE this book.  Have I mentioned how much I love this book?  I wrote a paper about it for my Austen class last semester which then became my PhD writing sample and I’m hoping to whip it into publication shape as soon as I have a moment to breathe.  I have to say despite everything reading this book feels like coming home again.  Shhhh.  Don’t tell Will I said that, he may be jealous.
2)    I’m giving a talk Saturday at the inaugural Rutgers Newark MA Consortium.  I haven’t looked at the paper I’m giving in months.  I haven’t looked at the notes on the paper I’m giving in months.  Luckily, I have a presentation written up I just have to brush the dust off of it and remember my Nietzsche.  Easier said than done I think.  Hey, by the way, come to the Rutgers Newark MA Consortium on Saturday!
3)    In a month, I will be past the roughest spot of this semester.  I’m torn on whether this is an awesome thing or a horrible one.  According to www.thegradcafe.com, Columbia’s decision letters usually come out the first week in March (or at least they do for my program).  My first midterm is due 3/9 (I will be begging an extension though so that I have Spring Break to work on it).  Spring break is 3/12-3/20.  MA exam is 3/21 and 3/22.  After that, I’m not gonna say it’s all smooth sailing, but at least I can ignore the extra reading that keeps weighing me down like a big regency dress on a chick who was forced to walk the pirate plank into some exotic gulf in Bermuda. 
4)    I am not where I want to be with my short story that I’m writing for my writing group.  I have a draft.  I want to have several drafts.  Pens down on this story is in three days.  Several drafts is so not going to happen.
5)    First stack of grading came to me yesterday.  I both adore and loathe the first stack of grading.  I am always eager to jump back in with my red pen in hand and learn them undergrads good.  On the other hand, putting a grade on the first assignment innately limits the potential of the students.  Before that first grade, they are all A students.  As soon as I mark this paper, lines are drawn as to the quality of the class and the work which should be expected from them.  This point of view may grant me, the grader, a little too much agency in what is really a problem precipitated by them, the students, but I can’t help but see things this way.  I want them to do well.  I don’t want anyone to do poorly; there’s no reason for them to do poorly.  The assignments aren’t mind-bending hard, we have resources for students who aren’t stellar writers to get help, and it’s not like they didn’t have warning about the workload for the course.  With proper time management skills and resource utilization, there is absolutely no reason why these students should do poorly in the class.  And still, I can nearly guarantee, at least a third of these papers will exhibit piss-poor quality (possibly poor enough to fail).  Sigh.
6)    I would very much like a massage, an honest-to-god day off, a good-looking man to come feed me chocolate-covered strawberries, and a pony.  Is that so much to ask?

>symBIOtically

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With my heart skipping beats for fear of typos and my hands trembling for fear of writing some unknown academic faux pas in the cover e-mail, I have finally taken the leap.
I just submitted my first abstract for publication.
The volume is a book which will be published in 2012 and is set to be the foundational text for the new MA program in Vampire Literature at the University of Hertfordshire.  The papers selected are mostly being pulled from the 2010 conference (“Open Graves, Open Minds”) at which I was supposed to present, but was rudely prevented from leaving the country by an errant volcanic eruption.  Seriously.  You can’t make this stuff up, people.
The CFP requested an 800-900-word abstract of the paper (yay for already having written it! Abstracts are so much easier when the paper actually exists!) along with a 200 word bio.
I hate writing bios almost as much as I hate writing personal statements.  The only thing that mitigates the bio from being the most detested form of personal writing is the fact that by the time the bio is requested, one has usually already been accepted into conference, panel, etc. of the requester.  While I do have to impress with my bio, nothing hinges on it.  The people reading it are already stuck with me (or about to be stuck with me if it’s going to be read aloud somewhere).
As you may have noticed by now, I do things slightly differently.  I’m not the most reverent of conference presenters (though my papers are meticulous and utterly professional).  I bring slideshows.  I am energetic.  I don’t read straight from a sheet of paper.  In short, I perform.  In the bio, I have no chance to do that.  It’s like asking me to take myself and cram it into two hundred words.  There’s no room for personality in two hundred words!  More importantly, if you’re asking to look at a bio, you want to see how professional I can be, not how charming.  I can be professional, I assure you, but I’d much rather be charming.  It comes more naturally to me and (frankly) I think I’m better at it.
Part of me hesitated briefly and wondered if the British academes wouldn’t be thrilled by an utterly irreverent bio.  I mean, they are British after all!  Their country birthed Monty Python and Red Dwarf!  They must have senses of humor! 
….but if they didn’t, then I’d be really up the creek without a paddle.  I’m already at a disadvantage for being a mere lowly graduate student, I really shouldn’t discredit myself any further with witticisms over content.  Even if they were going to be spectacular witticisms. 
So I sent them a serious bio.  But I just couldn’t help myself… I had to write the silly one.  It called to me with its siren song, longing to be birthed into the world.  Since I didn’t send it to them (and since I figure if you’re still reading this blog I haven’t offended you with my offbeat points of view), I’m sticking it here for you to read and enjoy.
Danielle Rosvally is a recovering actor who earned a BA in legos from New York University.  After realizing that she had neither the patience, diligence nor social anxiety to qualify as a real computer scientist, she shifted her focus and instead set to studying something her parents (and good senses) told her she would never make into a viable career: Elizabethan Theatre.
In addition to her University education, she has also studied both the theory and practice of classical theatre at the American Globe Theatre, The Actor’s Institute, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, The Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare & Company.  None of these institutions knew quite what to make of her, so she turned to Rutgers for an MA in English.  They don’t know what to make of her either.
Her primary research interests are in the practical application of theatrical scholarship as well as theatricality in traditionally non-canonical texts (whatever that means).  She is a TA in the Rutgers Newark performing and visual arts department where she works with minions towards her greater purpose of world domination via Shakespeare in the classroom.  She also works as an independent educator in Shakespeare scholarship, acting and stage combat.  It’s a lot easier to bend the masses towards world domination when she doesn’t have a neurotic professor breathing down her neck.  She hopes to be a mostly benevolent dictator, but firmly believes that poor grammar is a high crime worthy of being striped down, placed in the town square, tarred, feathered, then stoned to death.  Unless it’s her own grammar, of course, that she will blame on the poor graduate student who edits her papers.
You may follow her exploits via her blog at http://blackswanditty.blogspot.com
…so if you’ve got one of your own, I’d love to read it.  I really think one can tell more about a person by their sense of humor than their accomplishments.  It shows how willing he is to throw it all away and talk like a regular human rather than recitational parrot.  And anyone who can dispense with the traps of formality can easily prove that he actually knows the material in his heart rather than just in his head.  More importantly, it shows that a person isn’t too proud to laugh at himself.  And, my friends, I don’t care how many degrees I have.  If I ever lose that ability, please take me out to pasture with a none-too-friendly literary smack-down and bludgeon me to death with a Complete Works.  It will be well past my time to go.

>The Graduate Student Conference and You

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>I’m back.

First and foremost: an apology. I have been neglectful of you, dear blog. I have left you abandoned for upwards of a week when I promised I would be faithful to my bi-weekly updating. Between midterms, conferences, a show at work and interjections of my personal life, I have been negligent of this promise, but hope to find myself back on track in the coming weeks.

This past weekend, I attended the University of Montreal’s EGSS conference. The conference’s theme was Performance and Performativity and it was more than interesting to meet my Canadian Colleagues and hear what they had to say on the topic at hand. My paper was again well-received (Act I Scene I: Performativity and Theatricality in The Canterbury Tales) and I left the conference with a fount of new ideas. Intellectual stimulation at its prime; a wonderful way to spend any weekend.

It occurred to me as I sat in the University how very many things I had seen in the past few weeks that I wished someone had prepared me for. Indeed, before my first encounter with the conference circuit I had looked for some sort of FAQ or “guide to conferences for the inquisitive Graduate Student” and come up surprisingly short. I had so many questions, so many things I wanted to know, but due to my lack of information was forced to enter the endeavor blinded. Though my experience thus far has been limited (and very pleasant considering how lost I felt upon initial introduction to the experience itself), I am determined that another Graduate Student need not be plunged into the murky depths of conferencery without a guide. So, I present to you a bullet-pointed list of “things I wish someone had told me about Graduate Student Conferences before I left home”, or “How to Succeed in Conferencery Without Even Trying”, or “Everything you Ever Wanted to Know about Conferences but were Afraid to Ask”.

*Dress code at these things is business casual. I have seen many a conference-goer in jeans and a sweater vest/oxford shirt number. I myself have worn a suit, but I was definitely one of the few who put such effort and polish into my appearance. You will not be out of place in slacks and a nice shirt. But please, for everyone’s sake, wear nice shoes and not sneakers. You will look better and won’t give prim-and-proper-fogies like me headaches.

*They will feed you. Breakfast and lunch usually, dinner is on you. Breakfast will be bagels/donuts/pastries and coffee, and lunch will usually be some kind of sandwich platter and fruit salad. There will be abundant amounts of bottled water, so don’t worry about bringing your own.

*Everyone wears a nametag. Therefore, don’t worry too much about remembering names because you can just glance at it and have your answer. Instead, try to ask questions about your colleagues’ programs, areas of interest and primary research concerns. Remember that this is networking and not social hour, though having personality and things to connect about is a good thing. What would be better is connecting over intellectual concepts rather than computer games.

*Conferences. Are. Boring. I cannot emphasize this enough. People sit and read their papers. If you are lucky, they will be good at reading aloud and will have practiced their paper a time or two beforehand. If you are extraordinarily lucky, they will have pretty slides to look at. If you want to stand out in a crowd, be one of those people with pretty slides. If you are a kinesthetic learner like me, abandon all hope ye who enter here. I take copious notes at these things just to keep myself following the arguments. My notes also tend to prove amusing reads after the fact (the gem of this weekend being “phenomenologon… do do do do do” no doubt intended to be sung to the popular muppet ditty).

*If you are one of those awesome presenters who give a break from the tedium of reading academic mumbo-jumbo, ensure to have your presentation on both a laptop and a thumb drive. I have yet to be somewhere where I did not need both.

*Also have copious notes about the longer version of your paper readily available. It will come in handy when you are asked questions.

*Practice your presentation and time it. Come in at least one minute under requested time limit, more like five if you need to leave room for questions and such time isn’t worked into the panel for you.

*Academics run on caffeine, determination and fifty-cent words; not sleep. If you are like me and require eight hours to function, do not intend to go out after day one of the conference.

*Being at these conferences requires much more energy than you would think. You will be wiped afterwards. Go back to your hotel, grab a glass of wine, and decompress. Sleep well, you will need it.

*Don’t pay to get into a graduate conference. It’s not worth the money and there are plenty which will let you in for free. All-level conferences are different, you will be batting with the big boys there and should expect to pay for the privilege (yes, even if you’re presenting). This can get costly. One way to alleviate conference costs is to make friends in places where you think you may return; do not be above couch-surfing (especially if you have a couch in order to repay the favor in kind).

*Know, at least in the most basic terms, who Foucault, Derrida, Barthes and Bakhtin are before you attend. It will save you from intellectual humiliation and give you something to joke about with the other snobs. Also know who the big names in your field are and the basics of their work, it will help you follow papers being given.

*You are at this conference to witness the exchange of ideas amongst your peers and take the temperature of your work in comparison with and in front of same peers. Use that opportunity to its fullest extent. It’s not often that people let you look over their shoulders at their research.

*If there are panels you are not interested in, don’t go see them. The panelists would rather have an alert, awake audience than people snoring in the back row. Give yourself a break, grab a cup of coffee, or even leave early if you want to. There’s nothing wrong with this. Do not feel obligated to attend panels because the presenters will not feel obligated to attend yours.

*Don’t be shy; nobody knows anybody. Especially if you are visiting from far away, the locals are happy to have you and would love to tell you about the university and surrounding environs.

*Have fun. Seriously. If you’re not having fun, how do you expect to spend the rest of your life doing this?

….I am certain I am missing a thing or two. Further questions can be directed at this post and will be answered post-haste (please insert rim-shot sound effect here).

Goodnight, everyone.

>so…. how did it go?

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>I am certain that you are all wondering how the Virginia Tech EGSO conference went.

This being my first academic conference, I went in slightly nervous. It would have been extremely nervous except for the lack of sleep I was experiencing due to a mammoth snowstorm delaying my exit from New Jersey the day before the conference and the nine hour drive it took to get to Virginia.

It was a graduate conference, so it was probably more laid back thank these things usually are. I had pictured in my head a bunch of older scholars touting glasses, sweater-vests and tomes to rival the OED with which they beat their thesis until it cried for its mother. This was far from the case. It was a small conference of probably about forty graduate students in attendance (eighteen of whom were presenters). Most of the attendees were from Virginia Tech. I believe I was one of the three individuals who braved a long trip to get there, and I was certainly the only representative from the Northeast. Dress code was business casual and people were friendly, if slightly shy. We were all there for the work, but we were also interested in each others’ programs, future plans, it’s nice to be in a room full of people going through what you are going through but in an entirely different way.

My panel was second up so I had the opportunity to listen to a few papers before giving mine. I had prepped a slide show and a full-out presentation because really, listening to an academic read a paper off a page is perhaps one of the most boring things I could think of. Academics are not performers. And most of these budding academics were not even comfortable socially. Their eyes rested on the page, almost never flickering back up to us in the audience. They leaned on the text, clinging to it for dear life rather than releasing it to the room. While the subject matter of their paper was usually very interesting, it was difficult to digest the vast amounts of information they were spitting at us.

I am not an auditory learner. My auditory learning skills are extremely weak and as a result information merely spoken at me simply goes in one ear and out the other. Moreover, it tends to put me to sleep. Conferences, thereby, are going to be difficult for me. These papers are frequently dry and one-note with big words and citations from scholars whose work I have never heard of before. These papers are difficult to read, much less listen to.

For this reason, I knew that I wanted to appeal to more than one of my audience’s senses in my own presentation. Even observing the other presenters, I found slideshows to be extremely helpful. Being able to read along with the speaker helped me digest the paper and it demanded my full attention in order to keep up with her. Moreover, pictures and other visual aids stimulated my synapses in ways that the spoken word could not. Being able to see the paper helped me to follow it.

My paper (Act I Scene I: Theatricality and Performativity in the Canterbury Tales) was well received. One of the audience members was a teacher of Medieval Literature at VT. She had plenty of questions, comments, and feedback for me which was wonderful. There is nothing that is as soul killing as indifference and the rest of the room seemed to offer plenty of that. I mostly blame the way my panel was structured- there was no real theme to be seen. I spoke alongside a scholar presenting a piece on the history of animal imagery, and a scholar presenting a piece of creative writing. We were essentially the “catch-all” panel- panelists who did not fit into any of the conference’s categories so they glomped us together. While flattering to have written an original paper, I feel such a situation almost guarantees a lukewarm audience. With no true theme to express, we were bound to get a roomful of stragglers and wanderers who either did not want to see the other panel occurring at that time, or were mildly interested in one of our topics. This does not make for the best intellectual stimulation.

I got to see a panel later that afternoon about “the rhetoric of gaming”. There panel consisted of two papers on Dungeons and Dragons and one on Video Game Manuals. This, to me, was probably the most exciting panel of the day. It proved that academia could stretch and bend beyond what it would have ten or twenty years ago. Yes, we can keep up with the times. The academy can become its constituents, be those constituents gamer geeks or thespians. It gave me hope for my own work- especially after hearing that one of the presenters just wrote a book on communal narrative in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. If that book (which I find amazingly interesting) can reach the presses, then there’s room for anything else there. And certainly anything I’d be interested in working on.

I left the conference much more confident in my ability to tackle the academy. One of the wonderful things about these conferences is you get to hear what your peers are working on and producing. This is an extremely valuable experience. It allows you to take the temperature of the your work, better understand how it measures up to the output of those around you. If this is my competition for publication, I can say now that I feel I am ready for the challenge.

Of course, that could change… I do have several more conferences lined up for the spring. The first is another Graduate Conference, but then I start playing with the big boys. I am also presenting at two all-level conferences; one at the University of Hatfield and one with the New Jersey Writers’ Alliance. I can’t say I feel entirely prepared for the dive into the greater scholarly community, but I can say that I am excited for it. Hopefully that excitement will last and not become dread. Though I can also say with absolute certainty that the scholarly world has no idea what it is getting itself into by inviting me in.

>Here we Come a’Conferencing….

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>So while not a strictly literary update, I do feel this belongs on my literary blog.

My paper on Theatricality and Performativity in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has been accepted by the University of Montreal and I will be giving the paper at their 7th annual EGSS conference on Performance and Performativity. So, if you happen to be in Montreal in March, do stop by.

Quel beau projet!