Derek Whaley, Doctoral Candidate, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
It would be disingenuous of me to describe the 10th Biennial Conference of the Australian & New Zealand Association for Medieval & Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS) as everything I had hoped it would be. Perhaps that is the result of unrestrained enthusiasm for a medieval and early modern history conference with nothing to compare it to. Or perhaps it is caused by the striking realisation that I do not understand my period nearly as well as I had hoped. In any event, the conference was a wake-up call for me in many respects. It was my first academic history conference and it will not be my last.
One thing that shook the foundations of my understanding of history from the very beginning was the realisation that medieval and early modern history is an extremely vast subject composed of so many myriad parts. It spans the world, and the inclusion of presentations on Japanese and Arab societies really brought that home to me. Roundtable discussions in the evenings showcased the long-standing disagreements between historians over periodisation, globalisation, and female scholarship, as well as what careers are really opened to historians. In the deluge of information, I found myself often drowning in data and saddened that the topics I enjoyed so much were but a drop of water in a torrential rain.
Indeed, being a medieval Capetian historian, I found almost nothing that directly applied to my interests and little that peripherally referenced them. This left me with the onerous task of deciding which sessions I would attend throughout the five days of the conference. Sometimes I had great luck in my decisions, while other times the sessions fell flat for me. I am a particular person with particular interests, so not everything can be made easily interesting to me. I think that organising the papers by subject, while logical, actually hurt some of the sessions by bloating the topics with repetition or ghettoising specific topics that may not have attracted universal appeal. Mixing the various papers in the future may result in more people moving between sessions, but it also may result in higher turnouts for papers that would otherwise be ill attended.
While this was my first official conference, it is not the first time I have heard postgraduate and established historians speak in public. I was raised in the American school of communication and as such, I find the idea of literally reading papers, as many presenters did, to be somewhat tedious if not presented with forethought for the audience. A read paper is very different from a rehearsed presentation and those who presented their material off-script almost universally earned my attention over those those who simply read a modified chapter of their thesis. This is not to say that the content quality was different between the two, only that when presenting, those who speak to the audience come across as more confident and engaging than those who just read.
That being said, I presented my own research on the last session of the last day of the conference and was happy that so many people did attend considering the scheduling. I spoke off script, referencing my PowerPoint slides when necessary and otherwise working off an internal dialogue based on my thesis chapter and other research. It seems to have been well received, but only a few people were able to discuss the presentation since the conference ended immediately afterwards. I hope that if I attend a future conference, an earlier session may be afforded to me because the ability to discuss your topic with others, based partially off of your presentation, seems to be an essential aspect of the conference-going experience.
It is networking with others that the ANZAMEMS conference really succeeded for me. More important than the presentations, the keynotes, and the PATS was the ability to discuss ideas and research dilemmas with other post-graduate and early career historians. From the very first day, I felt welcomed by my peers, a member of the illustrious network of Australian and New Zealand historians. Throughout the course of the conference, I met many people, talked with them at lunch, and went out to dinner with them in the evening. My prized trophies from the conference are not CV-boosting presentation skills but a clutch of business cards I gathered. These are what will keep me in contact with those who will help me in the years to come. Networking is an essential part of careers, especially now, and so meeting new people and expanding your range of contacts all helps to ensure that when the time comes for a career decision, or when a referee is need, or even when you just need a person to talk to about your research, you will be prepared.
On that note, I must end by stating my general disappointment with the Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminar (PATS). Touted to me as an opportunity to expand my skills in a series of intensive training sessions, and advertised by previous PATS-goers as something worth the time, I found myself severely disappointed that nothing of the sort occurred here. The PATS was composed of a kind of present-and-respond format where the keynote speakers and the students all presented their thesis topic in brief and then responded briefly to it. It was not only unhelpful to the majority of us, but rather strange in its formatting. Had this exact same PATS occurred at the beginning of the conference rather than the end, it would have at least served as a postgraduate mixer to allow us to all meet each other and meet some accomplished historians. But placed at the end of the conference, it served only as an awkward footnote to an otherwise stimulating week.
Nonetheless, the ANZAMEMS conference felt like a success and it furnished me with myriad angles to consider in my future research and in my thesis. The range of historians I met while at the conference surprised and delighted me and made me see the lasting importance of medieval and early modern history to the present. Thank you to all the crew that helped make the conference happen and I hope to see you all again in Wellington in 2017.
