Calling Graduate Students to write for ESQ's New Feature:The Year in Conferences

ESQ:  A Journal of the American Renaissance is now putting together a team to cover the upcoming American Literature Association conference to be held May  in Cambridge MA for  "The Year in Conferences."  This new feature is a group-authored "report from the field."  Last year groups covered ALA, ASA, C19, and MLA; the completed piece will appear in the next issue.

Additional information:

"The Year in Conferences" is an annual group-authored report from the field that will provide a snapshot of what’s going on at the conference level. 

The idea is to assemble clusters of graduate students who will collaboratively author thematic reports from the major conferences that take place over the course of the year.  Ideally, the clusters will be composed of students from a variety of institutions.

Once teams are assembled, we determine through a collaborative process of email and skype exchanges, what strands will be covered and by whom.  I meet with the group on-site to further discuss format and procedures.  By the time we meet at the conference site, we will have established contact through an email strand, a skyped planning meeting and also set up a google docs account for the project.  (Using google docs really facilitates the collaborative writing process.  In fact the multi-leveled opportunities for collaboration is one of the features of this experience that I think has been so wonderfully productive.)   Contributors collaborate with me, each other, Jana Argersinger and the rest of the journal staff as well as see how other teams put together their entries.

All of this yields an important resource for the profession, a professionalizing experience, exposure to other people in the field, and a publication.  In fact, I’m so excited about this that this is the one thing I am doing for the journal while I am on leave!

I hope you’ll share my excitement about this new feature for the journal, share this email with whomever you think might be interested, and let me know if you have any further suggestions for how this might be developed.

All best-


Augusta
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Augusta Rohrbach
Associate Professor of English
Editor, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99163