Alex WellersteinVerified account

Hey, #twitterhistorians, a question/provocation for you about conference talks: why do we do them that way?

A little background: In addition to history meeting, I frequent physics meetings and philosophy meetings. Talks at these conferences are much different from ours.

Most notably, they often provoke discussion that causes speakers to defend and/or revise elements of their presentation. Sometimes very central ones.

These disciplines both have strong oral cultures and relatively constrained rules of argumentation, so this is in some sense unsurprising. But what is surprising is that, in the absence of those same culture features, history conference panels follow more or less the same format.

Because it’s rare to see similar sorts of exchanges after history talks. The “papers” we give tend to be developed to the point that they have both a narrative and an argument around it. Or at least we do our best to disguise the sketchy bits.

When a history project is at that stage, and presented in that way, it doesn’t benefit much from the sort of fleeting engagement we get in conference sessions. And in the age of the internet, the conference isn’t the best place to learn about new results.

So we give overbaked presentations to tepid applause followed by tepid questions, and then knock off to the bar to discuss the new projects we’re really interested in talking about. Why?