Advancing Racial Equity Speakers Bureau

I’m excited to serve on the speakers bureau as one of 15 people from across the state chosen by Indiana Humanities, our state humanities council. The 2023-2024 theme is Advancing Racial Equity.

I’ll be giving two major talks as part of the Speakers Bureau. One is entitled “Mirrors and Windows: Reading for & Beyond Empathy” and the other is “The Many Lives of Zora Neale Hurston.” The latter grew out of discussions and readings I did as part of my National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) work, Hurston on the Horizon. You can find the descriptions of my two talks below:

These and the descriptions of the other talks are available in the catalog linked here: https://indianahumanities.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Racial-Equity-Speakers-Bureau-V4.pdf

I’ll be giving multiple versions of these talks in 2024 across the state, some through the Speakers Bureau, and others in connection to Indiana Humanities’ One State / One Story program, whose book selections this year are Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake and Ashley Bryan’s Freedom over Me. Ever since my work with the Op Ed Project, I’ve been thinking more about how to discuss complicated issues such as race and equity with the public. I’m looking forward to these public conversations about the humanities and literature.

As I told my institution recently, “The intercultural and interdisciplinary analyses that the humanities provide are needed now more than ever, especially when it comes to complicated, open-ended issues such as advancing equity. I’m honored to lead humanities-based discussions with the public on the important topics of racial equity, literature, and empathy. My talks are still being booked, but at this point, I know I’ll be hosted by at least eight different organizations across the state, which shows a clear need for us to continue having these vital conversations.”

Naturalistic Elements in Wounded by Percival Everett

As a scholar and fan of metafiction, I am often drawn to the dynamic and prolific work of author Percival Everett. His most famous metafictional novel is his 2001 erasure. The novel is about a writer named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison who finds his philosophical work outshone by what in many ways is its opposite–an in-your-face “urban” novel about a potentially caricatured form of Black life. (erasure is arguably his most famous novel of all, though his new ones get a lot of attention every time one comes out. And of course, his 2020 Telephone was a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.)

I wrote about erasure and another metafictional novel, his 2013 Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, for the journal, African American Review.The article, entitled “Intimate Realities and Necessary Fiction in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell,” appeared in 2019. It would later form part of the basis for my book, Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives. In the fourth chapter, I read Everett’s work against that of Filipino American writer, Miguel Syjuco, and his 2008 novel, Ilustrado.

On to the new article!

My latest research on Percival Everett’s work is also my first foray into open-access publishing, which made it doubly exciting. You can find this article published in Humanities, an international peer-reviewed journal. The article is part of a special issue entitled “The Continuing Challenges of Percival Everett.” I believe you can download all of the articles in the issue here.

My contribution focuses on one of Everett’s many westerns, a 2005 novel entitled Wounded. The novel is deceptively simple on the surface, but the more I dug into it, the more I realized its interesting depths. My exploration began when I came across an interview where Everett was still working on the book and summarized it this way:

“The working title is Wounded. It’s a really naturalistic novel. My interest is in the form of a realistic novel. You have to love the form you’re working in, but I’m seeing what I can do.”

Percival Everett, in an interview with Joe Weixlmann (link)

You can find the full text of my article, entitled “Naturalistic Elements in Percival Everett’s Woundedat this link!

A Guide to Writing Op-Ed Articles

In 2022, I was a Public Voices Fellow for the OpEd Project, an organization that pairs participants with journalists to guide them in writing op-ed articles and other public-facing texts in their areas of expertise. One of the most useful writing tools I learned was what they referred to as the “15-minute op-ed”, a version of which I share below.

The Op Ed Project logo

First, some tips:

  • Keep this handy. News travels fast, in more ways than one. Even if you don’t plan on writing an op ed anytime soon, you never know when a timely event or chance encounter might spark an idea or opportunity. Alternatively, universities or community members might call upon you to submit something, and fast. Keep this as an easy reference in case the opportunity arises.
  • Remember: You are the expert. As specialists in multiethnic and other underrepresented literature in this current era, we are specially situated to speak to the public. I found this type of writing to be rewarding in that more people have read my articles in Newsweek, The Hill, or Ms. Magazine than they would have in likely any peer-reviewed journal behind a university paywall.
  • Block out bits of time in the week following a submission, and check your e-mail frequently! Op ed writing moves quickly, at an almost dizzying pace. It wouldn’t be unusual, for instance, to submit an article to an editor or magazine and have them respond within a day or so, with a set of revision suggestions to turn around by that same evening to be featured the next day. On the other hand, my Public Voices coaches also told me that it is true form to follow up if one hasn’t heard anything in a couple of days and to send the article elsewhere if it has stayed unpublished in one place for a week.
  • Keep it short and to the point. Clearly indicate one point or argument and end with one major action item. Most op eds are around 750-800 words! Read specific requirements for submission in your chosen venues for their requirements.
  • Keep your audience in mind. It is perhaps easy to forget that not many people have read the books or heard of the authors we know and love, and issues related to race, education, and more might land differently depending on the audience. Avoid jargon or discipline-specific language. Personal anecdotes and appeals to emotion might be more compelling than more straightforward data, and one well-chosen quote might do more than a bunch of combined quotes and evidence.
  • Read examples! I link to mine above, but there are so many out there, geared toward different audiences—including local newspapers, national magazines, and specialized publications. What they all suggest is that this writing is often focused on the big picture, and much broader than any of the more specialized peer-reviewed articles we might be accustomed to writing. At the same time, the argument and call to action are far more specific and tangible. In terms of tone and style, this type of writing is more straightforward and also significantly shorter—both in overall length and in paragraph and sentence lengths.
Logos for The Hill, Newsweek, and Ms. Magazine

The 15-minute op-ed

The 15-minute op-ed is what the OpEd Project calls a recipe or a suggestion rather than a formula. That being said, I’ve found that variations on the below work really well.

Part 1: A short attention-grabbing lede followed by a timely news hook. Following this, you will make an argument. For example, this could be for or against a recent bill with a specific explanation of why, or an identifiable idea or proposal directed to a specific audience.

  • This first part ties your article to something very recent. Part of the fast pace and turnaround has to do with the form of the op ed itself, which is almost always tied to a news hook of recent and immediate importance. This immediacy also shifted the revision process as it meant that a news hook from last week might go “stale” and require updating—which unfortunately has never been a problem for me as the news keeps on emerging with issues increasingly relevant to our fields and subfields.
  • Keep the links neutral. One more note about the hook: You aren’t likely to get an article accepted if your hook or other facts link to a rival magazine or newspaper. Consider instead a more neutral news source like the Associated Press, or for statistics and studies, link to the article itself.

Part 2: From here, write 2-4 short paragraphs that each provide evidence and brief analysis in the form of data and statistics, anecdotes and/or personal experiences, expert quotes or research.

  • While definitely the most convincing part of your article, this portion is where I also had to remind myself to keep sentences, paragraphs, and my overall article brief, frank, and geared toward a public audience. See too the above note about keeping links neutral.

Part 3: Take a moment here to address and offer a response to the most obvious counterargument(s).

In Public Voices, this is often called the “to be sure” statement – or the moment where you take a moment to acknowledge that there is legitimate concern in the countering argument(s), but that there is still merit in your original argument.

Part 4: Conclude with a wrap-up and, if possible, a concrete and doable call to action.

  • Reminding yourself of your audience and who might have the power to change the issue at hand will be especially helpful here. When possible, aim for a call that is more than simply increasing awareness of an issue.

And that’s it!

Most news organization and magazine websites will have instructions on a Submissions page or something similar, as well as word count and other preferences. Read examples from the site to find the right fit (in terms of content, style, and audience) for your work. Sometimes your area newspaper will have a wide reach and may even express preference in publishing a fellow local.

Remember to keep it brief and to the point. 750-800 words as a goal is always good, though sources and publishing venues may vary.

Keep in mind too that there is no such thing as wasted work. Even if an op ed grows “stale” by journalists’ standards, you might still find another home for your writing, whether it becomes absorbed into a longer, more academic article or another venue. My op ed on bell hooks, for example, found a home that I am very proud of in the Women, Gender, and Families of Color.

On bell hooks and compassion

Many scholars, teachers, and readers mourned the death of author and activist bell hooks. I first read bell hooks’ work in a graduate course. We were fortunate to be assigned an excerpt from Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, which informs much of my teaching to this day.

With all of the recent events including the country’s reckoning with Black killings, the pandemic, and the anti-Asian racism that followed, I found myself thinking a lot about bell hooks and very generous and forthright approach to compassion.

I began reflecting on this in a form of an op-ed for my work with the Public Voices Fellowship (more info here). But then I got an e-mail from Dr. Ayesha Hardison, one of our fearless leaders of our NEH Institute workshop, Hurston on the Horizon. She invited everyone to submit writings for a special issue of Women, Gender, and Families of Color entitled “Honoring bell hooks’s Legacy: Humanist, Feminist, Public Intellectual, Social Critic, and Educator.” It was nice to have the opportunity to think more deeply about hooks’s thoughts on compassion in the company of fellow scholars, readers, and fans. We even had a kickoff on Zoom to celebrate the issue’s completion.

The special issue’s guest editors Cécile Accilien, Manisha Desai, and Luz María Gordillo also serve as members of the journal’s editorial board. In place of a traditional preface, they created a trailer of their conversation about the issue. You can view it here:

Guest editors’ recorded introduction. The full video is available here.

The essay I wrote, titled “Trusting in the Power of Compassion,” ended up being more personal than usual. I also talked a bit about Lauren Berlant, who died around the same time as hooks. You can read it in its entirety here: https://womengenderandfamilies.ku.edu/online-essays-honoring-bell-hookss-legacy/1362/

Novel Subjects book talk!

My book, Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives, turned a year old this past June, and a lot has happened since its publication!

Just before it was published, I was able to give a talk on it for one of my favorite organizations, The Circle of Asian American Literary Studies (or CAALS); I do a brief recap of that talk at this link.

A bit later on January 2022, I got some still-amazing-to-me news: Novel Subjects won the Midwest Modern Language Association Book Award.

Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives - MMLA 2021 Book Award winner - blurb: “Milne offers a bold intervention in the field of contemporary American literature: a defense of multiculturalism at a time when it seems to have been largely abandoned except in corporate circles. When so much of American political discourse seems to be beholden to a resurgent anti-immigrant ethnonationalism, such a defense is welcome.”—Min Hyoung Song, author, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American

Most recently, I gave a #USSOBookHour talk about Novel Subjects to US Studies Online, an organization that bills itself as “the Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher webspace of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS).”

My first experience with this organization was way back in 2015, when I was still a graduate student UNCG. My advisor and mentor, the great Dr. María Carla Sánchez, was (and remains) very actively involved in the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). She encouraged me to write a short article for this thing they were doing–a series of articles they were doing in collaboration with US Studies Online. From that resulted one of my first online articles, “(In)Visibility, Race, and Ethnicity in American Women’s Writing throughout the Twentieth Century.” (I remain proud of the fact that it sports a picture of Mindy Kaling and a book by Gina Apostol.)

A few months later, US Studies Online invited me to lead a USSO Book Hour. Back then, these events were public, moderated book-group-style discussions. I definitely dealt with imposter syndrome while leading an online discussion about Toni Morrison’s novel God Help the Child along with Justine Baillie, Michelle Green, and Susan N. Mayberry, but it was a lot of fun.

I ended up talking about Morrison’s novel again in my talk last week. In the current format of USSOBookHour, a scholar gives a talk about their book, and then takes questions from attendees. Organizer Aija Oksman from The University of Edinburgh informed me that a number of the early career and graduate student attendees wanted to know about how Novel Subjects went from dissertation-to-book, so I included that in my talk as well. You can find more about the event at the below link, and a recording below

The OpEd Project

Recently, I completed a year-long fellowship with The OpEd Project. Their work focuses on training subject experts to increase their public outreach, primarily through journalism such as oped or editorial articles.

During my participation as a Public Voices Fellow , I attended several workshops, collaborated with colleagues, and did a lot of soul-searching about my personal and professional public identity. Most significantly, I  also had the opportunity to work one-on-one with coaches whose own journalistic accomplishments are numerous.

Eventually, my op eds were published in places such as Newsweek, Ms. Magazine, and The Hill. You can find a list of my most recent op eds below the image.

Logos for The Hill, Newsweek, and Ms. Magazine

Hurston on the Horizon – NEH institute

The NEH Hurston scholars 2021

UPDATE: I published an op-ed with Visible Magazine about Hurston’s somewhat controversial take on Brown v. Board of Education. You can find the article here: https://visiblemagazine.com/zora-neale-hurston-was-prescient-on-race/

Last summer, I was one of 25 scholars chosen to participate in a summer institute on the great author and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston. The National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute entitled Hurston on the Horizon: Past, Present, and Future was directed by Ayesha Hardison and Maryemma Graham and is affiliated with the University of Kansas Project on the History of Black Writing. KU, by the way, is where Hurston biographer Robert Emery Hemenway’s archives are housed as he was a chancellor there, and we got to access those archives along with other exciting material. We were also fortunate to have at our Zoom-ing fingertips access to some of the greatest Hurston scholars as institute faculty and guest speakers, including the aforementioned directors, Kevin Quashie, Deborah McDowell, Glenda Carpio, Carla Kaplan, Giselle Anatol, and more.

My interest in participating in the Institute comes from being a big fan of Hurston’s novels, but also having the chance to devote time to reading everything else she has written. I remain especially interested in the way she writes about navigating institutional spaces as a woman of color, and what’s behind that characteristic grit that we often read about in her essays such as “How It Feels to be Colored Me.” I was able to share some of her writings as well as video and audio from our institute and some great Library of Congress materials from Hurston’s ethnographic work with my students this past semester for my Women Writers course, and hope to be able to do so again this upcoming semester in my American Literature course. (You can find more about my teaching here.)

Hurston webinars

Last month, as part of the institute, I also moderated the third of three follow-up webinars. The first was with the great Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd, and the second was with novelist Tayari Jones. You can find my live-tweet coverage of the Boyd discussion here. I moderated the third talk, with philosopher Lindsay Stewart. Our talk on her book, The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism, is below. Information on all three webinars can be found here: https://hurston.ku.edu/news/webinars

There’s more to come with Hurston! Among other things, I will be participating in a mini-conference with other fellow NEH institute scholars later this month. My presentation, “Hurston on the Limits of Knowledge and Representation,” will discuss some of her essays, including a few recently published for the first time this month. We hope to be able to do an in-person reunion and meetup sometime next year at ZoraFest.

You can find out more about the institute here: https://hurston.ku.edu/

My book, Novel Subjects, is here!

It’s been a busy few weeks so I haven’t had the chance to post about the fact that my book, Novel Subjects Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives, is officially a real thing out in the world!

Milne - Novel Subjects
The book cover of Novel Subjects! (Keep reading for a discount code.)

In my defense, part of why I’ve been so busy has been because I was preparing a presentation on the book, which I gave as part of the 2021 Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) Virtual Conference.

2021 Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) Virtual Conference
You can find the full conference schedule at http://caals.org/caals2021

My presentation was part of a larger book conversation panel with Dr. Swati Rana, whose book is entitled Race Characters Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream (2020, UNC Press). Even though she covers the 20th century from 1960 and before while my book talks about a bunch of books published more than a couple of decades later, it turned out that there were numerous overlaps in our concerns and questions. Our conversation was moderated by the great Dr. Betsy Huang.

For my part, I outlined two of the basic questions underpinning Novel Subjects, namely:

  • How does contemporary literature contend with the power and responsibility of authorship, particularly in narratives of marginalized groups?
  • How has multiethnic literature challenged the notion that writing and authorship are neutral or universal?

I provided an example from Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel, A Tale for the Time Being. Ozeki’s novel depicts two author-protagonists—one named and modeled after Ozeki herself, who happens upon a journal written by a second author, the fictive teenaged writer named Nao. Especially because they are separated by time and space, we might assume that this reader-writer relationship goes in only one direction.

A diagram of writers/readers/protagonists in A Tale for the Time Being.

However, in Ozeki’s novel, it’s circular—both writers have the power to influence the other in very personal and intimate ways that also shape their self-assessments and perspectives. In fact, at one point, (spoiler alert!) the character Ruth actually crosses into the fictional storyworld of Nao and Nao’s grandmother, deliberately altering the trajectory of the plot itself.

In this way, my book focuses on author-characters who Sara Ahmed might call willful and intrusive—they both intrude upon and interrupt the metafictional tales that they tell, while at the same time willfully insisting upon telling these tales in the first place, often through a reliance on unconventional, unaccepted, or even  seemingly inauthentic methods and approaches.

If you want to know what texts I discuss in Novel Subjects, you can find a Bookshop list here.

My publisher has kindly offered a 40% discount code on Novel Subjects for those who are interested. You can order from their website using the code NOVEL40.

Carlisle Indian School archives in the classroom

UPDATE: I wrote a more recent reflection on this work for the National Humanities Alliance site, Humanities for All. You can find the article, entitled “Exploring the Carlisle Archive,” linked here:

https://humanitiesforall.org/blog/exploring-the-carlisle-archive

Below is a portion of a talk I’ll be giving next month at MELUS on using archival material on the history of Native American schools, include Carlisle. In the rest of the talk, I discuss other secondary texts by Indigenous authors that use archival material as a primary source.

I gave an earlier version of this talk at the Digital Native American and Indigenous Studies workshop and received really helpful feedback which also contributed to the below post.

Leah Milne presenting at the Digital Native American and Indigenous Studies workshop
Leah Milne presenting at the Digital Native American and Indigenous Studies workshop

My initial attempts to incorporate archival work in the classroom involved reading various selections from the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (hereby referred to as CISDRC). Carlisle’s founder, General Richard Henry Pratt, became famous for the school’s mission, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The saying signifies a change in Pratt’s approach from militaristic decimation to scholastic incorporation through erasures of Indigenous languages, cultures, and traditions. In a speech given in 1892, Pratt surmises, “Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.”[1] In other words, Pratt suggests, isolate the Native American child from his family and tribe, impose upon him the language, religion, and customs of dominant white culture, and he will then become capable of contributing to society, thus solving the looming question of what to do with “our” dwindling indigenous population.

Begun by Dickinson College in 2013. the CISDRC had only been around for two years in digitized form when I offered to pilot a lesson incorporating the student records into my curriculum. I introduced students to the archive and to Carlisle itself through supplementary firsthand accounts of Carlisle from authors such as Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota) and Berenice Levchuk (Navaho) and a documentary film entitled Warrior Women about Lakota community organizer Madonna Thunder Hawk. Students also had assigned class readings of certain student files and publications of the time period put together by Carlisle teachers and students, such as The Indian Helper and The Red Man. Eventually, I instruct students to research the archive on their own by first finding one student and at least one element of personal connection—a shared instrument that both my student and the Carlisle student played, or someone who is from the same state or part of the country, for example.

Madonna Thunder Hawk on the cover of a Warrior Women documentary poster
Madonna Thunder Hawk, Warrior Women

Discussing her own experience with a digitized archive, Megan A. Norcia highlights how “technology enables students to find new meanings in old texts; offers a model of scholarly intervention in ongoing critical discussions; engages students of different learning styles by reinvigorating the writing and research process; and causes them ultimately to question how history is represented, framed, and processed in the present moment.”[2] To say that all of this advancement occurs as a result of the medium is not a stretch. As much as the students and I discussed the contents of the archives, we also discussed the unstable nature of the archive and of archival research in general. They learn to see that the “official” record of history found in textbooks, government documents, and documentaries has been carefully edited, and is incapable of highlighting all perspectives, nuances, and experiences.

Buried within the archive’s minutiae, such as demographic information on a student information card that would make the CISDRC student records similar to other schools at the time, are often revealing alumni follow-up surveys indicating where the student has gone since leaving Carlisle. For example, over ten years after the school began enforcing Pratt’s mission in 1879, Shoshone tribe member Phillip E. Lavatta became a student there at age 17. Whether he chose to attend voluntarily or not is unknown; however, it is likely that, once he got there, he received the same treatment as other Carlisle students. As seen in John N. Choate’s photographs of fellow student Tom Torlino taken at his admittance in 1882 and then again three years later,[3] Lavatta’s hair would have been similarly cut short, his more “culturally marked” clothing replaced with the standard Carlisle-recommended garb, which usually was Western civilian clothing or an Army green uniform. As another unwilling participant of a compulsory program to eradicate native cultures, he would have been forced to abandon his native language for English, answer only to his English name, and be placed with a white family rather than being allowed to go home.

From Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center – Tom Torlino, 1882 and 1885

Answering the questions on his former student survey, Lavatta took the opportunity to hold forth on his lack of rights as a Native American. Responding to the open-ended prompt of “Tell me anything else of interest connected with your life,” Lavatta mimics dominant rhetoric about Native American inferiority at that time, writing:

We have been having, and will continue to have trouble with gov’t officials regarding our “rights.” We are children and should not be taught to strike back in self-defense. We should be made to understand that whenever a mistake is made in Washington that it was the work of some “clerk.” …and still the cry in the Indian office is that the returned Carlisle student is a “kicker” – that is the name I have for now.[4]

Lavatta’s reference to a “kicker” connotes in this instance neither a position on the famous Carlisle Indian School football team nor a member of the Kickapoo Nation, but rather appears to refer to the assumption of Carlisle students as rebels or protesters. Despite this reputation, Lavatta’s impassioned statement is quite unusual to see in the student records retained in the CISDRC given the straightforward nature of much of the information contained there. Lavatta ends the above diatribe in a jarring contrast typical of many of the student files when he concludes, “Could write more but will close, with best wishes for the school, yourself, and others under your charge. Respectfully yours, Phillip E. Lavatta, Pocatello, Idaho.”

The switch in tone could mean many things, whether it’s a mere recognition of the formality of letter-writing, or protection from the dangers that come with being a kicker or even with criticizing the school that may have treated one so harshly, and so on. It may also reflect the nature of the potentially conflicting experiences that Lavatta experienced there, a tension that was often difficult to pinpoint in the archive records themselves. Students found such expressions of personality and even protest to be the most exciting discoveries in the archive, however potentially suppressed, bowdlerized, and edited.

Overall, my students and I benefited greatly from what Susan Wells famously identifies as the “three gifts of archival work”: namely, a resistance to closure, a loosening of resentment (by productively facing the anxieties of our discipline), and finally, a reconstruction of the disciplines of rhetoric, composition, and—to Wells’ characterization I add—ethnic American literature, in order to “rethink our political and institutional situation, [and] to find ways of teaching that are neither narrowly belletristic [or solely aesthetic] nor baldly vocational.”[5] Discussing her own experience with a digitized archive, Megan A. Norcia highlights how “technology enables students to find new meanings in old texts; offers a model of scholarly intervention in ongoing critical discussions; engages students of different learning styles by reinvigorating the writing and research process; and causes them ultimately to question how history is represented, framed, and processed in the present moment.”[6]

To say that all of this advancement occurs as a result of the medium is not a stretch. As much as the students and I discussed the contents of the archives, we also discussed the unstable nature of the archive and of archival research in general. They learn to see that the “official” record of history found in textbooks, government documents, and documentaries has been carefully edited, and is incapable of highlighting all perspectives, nuances, and experiences.


For more on my teaching, click here.
For other conference presentations I’ve given, click here.


[1] Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” 382.

[2] Norcia, “Out of the Ivory Tower Endlessly Rocking,” 93.

[3] These and other before-and-after photographs of Carlisle Indian School students when they first arrive versus their appearance several years after admittance are available at the CISDRC.

[4] “Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.”

[5] Wells, “Claiming the Archive for Rhetoric and Composition,” 58–60.

[6] Norcia, “Out of the Ivory Tower Endlessly Rocking,” 93.

Converting your class paper into a conference presentation

Congratulations on getting your paper accepted to a conference! If you’re working from a revision of a previously written course paper, here’s some advice on how to adapt it to a conference presentation.

(If you are looking for advice on conference proposals, I highly recommend the format suggested here by Dr. Karen Kelsky. I promise that I pretty much use a version of this format for almost every single conference presentation proposal I submit, and it has done me very well. In fact, to prove it, you can scan some of my conference presentation titles here, and I’m happy to send you my own examples that use this format – just ask!)

How most of your conferences will work in literary studies:

  • The typical format of most literary studies conferences is that you read – dynamically and with good cheer – from a paper.
  • Every conference is a little different in terms of the scope, level of formality, etc., but you usually read this paper as part of a panel, often of 3-4 presenters each with their own related conference presentation.
  • Panels are typically concurrent, meaning that other people in other nearby rooms may be presenting at the same time as you, and your audience will thus likely be there because they are interested in your work and those of your fellow presenters!
  • Typically you will get somewhere around 10-20 minutes to present your work, with time allotted at the end of the panel for questions and discussion. A panel chair is usually present for introductions and keeping time.
  • Some presenters will pass out handouts or other information related to their presentation, though this is optional.
  • Bigger conferences will have a discussant or someone set to respond to the panel presentations as a whole and to ask additional questions.

First: What NOT to do:

  • Do not assume everyone has read your primary text. At the same time, spend no more than few sentences summarizing. Get to your argument quickly and start proving it. Show your work.
  • Do not just pick an 8-10 page chunk of a paper and read it. If you are adapting a shorter talk from a longer paper, you can refer to it during Q&A (“In my longer project, I actually address your question…”) and/or – if necessary – in your brief introduction (“This presentation is part of a longer article that I am working on. I’d appreciate any feedback you can offer.”)
  • Do not say “quote unquote” to set off your quotes. That can get annoying. Use inflection, pausing, and good writing to make the line between your words and everyone else’s words clear.
  • Do not go over your time! Estimate about 2 minutes of reading per double-spaced 12-pt Times New Roman page. Check with the panel chair/moderator to see how long you have, and then practice. You don’t want to be the jerk who takes away from everyone else’s time because you spoke too long! 🙂

Now, things to do!

  • Keep your sentences short and simple. Unlike regular papers, complex and complicated sentences will not do. People are listening to you read, which takes concentration. Make it as easy for them as possible.
  • Speaking of which, give cue words & signposts. Say, “In this paper, I will argue that…” etc. Remind your audience occasionally of what you are arguing and why it is important. Because this is oral, you will want to signpost these reminders more than you do in your written essay.
  • Choose the strongest points. Especially when adapting a longer paper, you will want to pick the best parts. If you have a short amount of time, focus on only one text.
  • If necessary, adapt your revision to the conference theme or the panel theme. I hope that you did this when you proposed your presentation in the first place, but audiences can tell if you are trying to shoehorn an unrelated topic into a panel. It may only take a tiny bit of extra work to adapt your paper to the panel/conference theme, and you’ll find many happy accidents that will further connect presentations together if you do so.
  • Especially if you are not presenting an extemporaneous speech or PowerPoint, etc., it is important to keep your audience engaged. Do not just read mechanically, without looking at the audience. Make eye contact, read their body language, adapt if they look bored. Stay excited about what you are reading. It’s okay to interrupt yourself to further explain something if it seems necessary. Have fun!
  • Have a clear introduction and a strong and memorable conclusion. End with a “thank you.” Smile.
  • Conferences are for networking! If possible, arrange ahead of time for your fellow presenters and/or the panel chair to celebrate afterward with coffee or dinner. Attend other panels and ask questions during Q&A, and/or in a follow-up e-mail. Thank the presenter after the talk for answering and exchange info. Talk to people from other schools. Who knows? You may make a new friend, meet a future colleague, or discover a new opportunity. 🙂
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