The Return of the Conference

I'm horrendously behind, so I shouldn't be writing this.

The reason I am horrendously behind, though, is worth celebrating, so I am trying to write this quickly in a fifteen-minute lull while I wait for a student.

Last week, I attended my first academic conference in three years.

It was my Spring Break in 2020 when news of the coronavirus really began to spread. I was supposed to be writing my paper for the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association's 2020 conference, but I was having trouble focusing. I was hanging out with two friends who were supposed to be writing their papers for the 2020 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, but had decided to not go because of COVID. Should I be not going myself? Soon the decision was taken out of my hands; NCSA was cancelled. Eventually it would be rescheduled for 2022.

There have been virtual conferences and such, but I have had little stomach for the idea of more Zoom sessions, so I haven't been to a conference since NCSA 2019.*

Some academics like to complain about conferences, or dread them, but I really like them. They have much of the good bits of academia with the bad bits: you get to hear smart people talk about interesting things, and you yourself get to talk about things that your students and colleagues don't really care about in general. I feel like at this point, I am a very good presenter, to be honest, and it's fun to get to talk about (say) George Eliot and Charles Kingsley and Positivism for fifteen minutes. (Twenty would have been nicer!)

NCSA has become my home conference, I guess. It has a very laid-back, friendly vibe. It's not too big or too small. It doesn't seem to attract the kind of people who spend more of their presentations discussing theory than primary sources. It is interdisciplinary, attracting literary scholars, historians, art historians, and musicologists who work on the nineteenth century in America, the UK, Europe, and beyond, and thus causing me to learn interesting things about thing I would not have ever thought about, such as Parisian graveyards in the post-Napoleonic era. Its schedule is very humane.

This was my fourth time attending. Usually I go with my grad school friends Christiana and Kim, but neither could make it this year, which I will admit had me nervous! But I think it is probably the first conference I have gone to without a close friend where I still managed to eat every meal with someone else, and never felt isolated or adrift. There are several people I have seen at NCSA repeatedly now, and several more I hope to see again. I missed getting to catch up with old friends, of course, and I hope it doesn't become an issue next year, too.

Bring on NCSA 2023 in Sacramento!

* Funnily enough, I actually attended five conferences from March 2018 to March 2019: NCSA 2018, ChLA 2018, SFRA 2018, NAVSA 2018, and NCSA 2019. I guess this makes up for my ensuing conference desert.