On Thursday of last week, I had the pleasure of attending the online conference Re-Imagining the Victorians. Co-organized by Dr. Brooke Cameron and PhD Student Sydney Wildman, the conference was hosted and created in conjunction with Dr. Cameron’s graduate English seminar. As a student in her course, I had the opportunity to help build the conference, eventually presenting a paper and moderating a panel.
Although I had presented at last year’s iteration of the conference, organized by Dr. Lara Karpenko and her students at Carroll University, being on the organizing side of the conference, and especially moderating a panel, gave me a whole new perspective on conferences and the connections they can foster.
Although many conferences are taking place over the next few weeks as the winter term comes to an end, summer and fall conferences are gearing up and looking for panelists, moderators, and attendees. Attending a conference in any capacity can be a great way to meet new colleagues, keep up to date with your field, and get feedback on works in progress.
In all the many conversations I’ve had about the benefits of attending and presenting at conferences, I don’t think there’s been enough talk about signing on as a moderator. If you’re interested in attending a conference, I can’t recommend reaching out about moderating a panel enough. Your department may even have a graduate conference looking for moderators.
Beyond the opportunity to listen to thoughtful and thought-provoking research, being a moderator allowed me to see the presentations in a different light. Since one of the tasks that often comes with being a moderator is coming up with questions to ensure a lively Q&A session, I took notes during the session, something I admit I don’t always do. This made it so much easier to keep track of my questions and to think through some of the major takeaways from each talk. It was gratifying to see such a rich and engaged discussion take shape.
Asking the first question, especially on Zoom, can be intimidating, but I feel like having questions prepared in advance helped minimize any long pauses. Knowing that I was going to be a moderator later in the day also made me more attuned to the work my colleagues were doing in the earlier sessions, giving me a much better appreciation for just how much work goes into conferences. It was such a great opportunity to learn from other graduate and undergraduate students’ research and presentation styles. While there were major takeaways on Victorian scholarship, the conference – and especially the panel I moderated – allowed me to learn about scholarship more broadly and what it means to be a part of a community of intellectual inquiry. As a graduate student in the very early stages of my career, opportunities like this one feel particularly valuable.