EBook: Professional Issues:
Check out the new section, Professional Lists and Web Resources

Publishing. Everyone knows that publishing is a good and, indeed, an essential thing to do. There is little organized support at the University of Mississippi for graduate students' publication efforts. Professors are generally quick to tell you when they think a paper is potentially publishable. Moving from potentiality to actuality is somewhat problematic, however. When you are told that a paper has potential, you should actively solicit advice as to how to revise the paper and pinpoint a suitable outlet for it. Don't expect to place your first essay with the first journal you send it to; but if you think your work has merit, keep sending it out until it finds a home. Bear in mind the reason why publications matter: they are an indication of your ability to negotiate the complex world of the academy. This includes your ability to recognize which journals have standing and prestige in your particular academic area and to aim high.

Grants. Grants are financial awards offered by various foundations and government agencies in support of particular kinds of work. In general, there are few available in our discipline but you should seek out the reference books available on the subject and apply for anything that seems to fit. These books are available at the Office of Research, currently a division of the Graduate School.

Professional Societies. The least important part of one's professional life as a graduate student, these organizations generally take your money and recompense you with a journal you will not read. If you submit a paper to, for example, a regional MLA, you may be required to join the organization before the conference. Wait until you are accepted to join. There is little benefit to listing a number of organizations on your vita, especially now that many of the previous benefits of such organizations can be accessed by signing up for various listserves. In fairness, we should mention that many professors find membership in these societies invaluable in their professional lives, allowing them to make contacts that lead to conference presentations and publications.
 

Conferences. The purpose of going to conferences changes over the course of one's graduate career. At first, delivering a paper can provide an opportunity to gain poise and professionalism, to compare your work to the work of others. Graduate student conferences, like our own Southern Writers, Southern Writing or the Sigma Tau Delta national meeting, generally offer friendly and receptive audiences and we suggest that you consider these as a first step. Some regional and national conferences, like the Twentieth Century Literature Conference at the University of Louisville, also especially welcome graduate student proposals. To find out about conferences, consult PMLA or check out the UPenn Calls for Papers listserv or other professional web resources--see below. As you progress in your career, you should begin to seek out conferences in your own particular field. If you do Southern Literature, for example, the regional SAMLA meeting is often a good place to meet others working in the area.

Please see the section on travel monies when you begin to consider conferencing.

There is some argument over the value of conferencing. When you are looking for a job, people will often be put off by too much conferencing in relation to publication. You should use conferences as a way of getting full value from work you have already done, or are in the process of doing, rather than distracting yourself from your academic progress by taking on extra tasks. Some graduate students find conferences a convenient way to set goals for themselves during the comprehensive exam and dissertation writing process; a twenty-minute paper can often serve as the seed of a chapter.

Professional Lists and Web Resources:

H-Net is "an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our edited lists and web sites publish peer reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussion for colleagues and the interested public." Their web address is http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/

Perspectives in American Literature is a web site operated by Paul Reuben, and contains a large bibliography on American poets, playwrights, and novelists. http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/home.htm

The UPenn Calls for Papers List is a great way to find out about academic events off of our campus. While their primary service is to present CFPs and information about how to send an abstract to a conference you might want to go to, they also have information about e-journals, and calls for entries for books.

Just sign up and they will send the CFPs to your e-mail address, or you can visit their list of CFPs at their web site. Their information follows below.

====== cfp@english.upenn.edu ======= Calls for Papers in English & American Literature The English Department at the University of Pennsylvania hosts an electronic mailing list (cfp@english.upenn.edu) and web site(http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/) for calls for papers on English and American Literature and Culture. We encourage conference or panel organizers and volume editors to find the largest possible audience for their announcements by posting them on this list and web archive. Announcements can include upcoming conferences, panels, essay collections,and special journal issues related to English and American literature, and can include calls for completed papers, abstracts, and proposals. The boundaries are flexible: all English-language literatures, cultural studies, literary theory, bibliography, humanities computing, and comparative literature (even when not concerned specifically with English or American literature) are within the pale. Conferences or panels devoted exclusively to literature not in English, to music or art, to history, etc., are excluded unless they are relevant to students of English and American literature, as are lecture series, regular meetings of small local societies, fellowship opportunities, etc. Essay competitions and prizes are excluded unless they will result directly in publication or presentation of a paper. Calls for creative writing are also excluded. Due to the volume of postings and the fact that each posting must be approved and edited by hand, the CFP list and web archive is only for calls for papers, not for general conference announcements. ------- SUBSCRIBING/UNSUBSCRIBING -------- To subscribe to the list, address a message to listserv@english.upenn.edu Do NOT send subscription messages to cfp@english.upenn.edu. The subject line can be anything, but the body of the message should read subscribe cfp There should be nothing else: no name, no e-mail address. You should receive a confirmation message after a few minutes. If you have any questions, contact the editor at the address below. To unsubscribe, address a message to listserv@english.upenn.edu (not cfp@english.upenn.edu!) reading just "unsubscribe cfp" (don't include your name or address). To change your address on the CFP list, send an unsubscribe message from your current account, and then login to your new account and resubscribe from that. The Majordomo software on which the CFP list is run, I'm afraid, has no facility for digests and no "no mail" option. Also, we cannot send announcements only in a given field or fields of interest within English and American Literature. Those who find the volume of mail too high should rely on the Web archive; those who wish to stop receiving mail for a short while should simply unsubscribe and resubscribe later. ------ WEB ARCHIVE OF ANNOUNCEMENTS ------ Those interested in the calls for papers need not subscribe to the list directly. The announcements will be archived and available on the Web at http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/ There they'll be grouped under rubrics (such as Renaissance, American,Theory, Gender Studies) to make browsing easier. Postings will remain in this archive until the conference has taken place. The web site also includes a search engine and a monthly archive, which lists calls for papers chronologically as they are posted. Messages are sorted into their respective period- or topic-centered folders within about a week after their posting, but the "Archive by Month" is automatically updated with each new message. Please check to see whether announcements have been posted already before sending additional copies. -------- POSTING ANNOUNCEMENTS -------- All panel organizers and volume editors are encouraged to make their calls for papers or proposals by sending their announcements to: cfp@english.upenn.edu After they are posted to the list, messages will automatically be archived on our web site: http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/ Please send postings as "plain text" (aka. ASCII text) in the body of the message rather than as an attachment. Calls can take any format in the body of the message. The subject line,though, should be as informative as possible (to enable browsers to find relevant announcements quickly), and should take the following form: CFP: Topic of Conference/Panel (deadline; conference date) Messages that don't conform to this standard may be rejected. The subject line should briefly and clearly describe the topic of the conference. Some tips: * Rather than a cryptic panel title like "Imagined Encounters," use a descriptive entry like "New World in16th c." * Put dates in numerals, in American notation (month/day/year).Include both the deadline for submissions and the date of the conference. * In the case of major conferences where the name of the conference will be useful (e.g. ALA, ASECS, NASSR, Kalamazoo),specify the name in addition to the dates. In the case of MLA,specify the year (e.g. MLA '01). * If the conference takes place outside North America, or if it's a graduate student conference, note that as well. Some examples: CFP: Teaching Beowulf in Translation (12/15/00; 3/23/01-3/24/01) CFP: (Post)Colonial Derrida (3/3/00; MLA '00) CFP: American Novel into Film (3/1/01; RMMLA, 10/11/01-10/13/01) CFP: Composition and Rhetoric (grad) (12/1/00; 2/23/01-2/24/01) CFP: Joseph Conrad (Poland) (1/15/01; 5/29/01-6/1/01) CFP: Romanticism & the Woman Reader (grad) (UK) (7/15/00; 9/6/00) CFP: Queer Theory and Disability Studies (8/1/00; journal issue) CFP: Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (4/30/01; collection) Note that with several thousand subscribers, some addresses on the list are no longer correct, as people change addresses without unsubscribing,or as hosts change names. The editor tries to keep the list current, but you may receive error messages from some of these bad addresses when you send a call for papers. You can safely ignore them. If you want to know whether a call for papers successfully made it to the bulk of the subscribers, you can either check the archive on the Web or contact the editor. If a call for papers must be updated -- to reflect a change in the location or date of the conference or the deadlines -- please replace the"CFP:" in the subject line with "UPDATE:" and be explicit about exactly what has changed in the body of the message. Please send only actual updates to the list: refrain from merely reiterating past calls for papers. Also, while I can post updates to the information in a call for papers, I cannot post general updates about the conference itself when the deadline for a call has already passed (e.g. registration info, finalized program, etc.) --------- OFF-TOPIC MESSAGES ---------- The CFP list is meant strictly for announcements of calls for papers, not for discussion of conferences and certainly not for discussion of anything else, including social issues, chain letters, virus warnings, and so on. Please refrain from posting such messages to the list. Advertisements of commercial products or services not directly related to the purpose of the list are forbidden. ------- HISTORY ------- In 1995 the English at the University of Pennsylvania established the cfp@english.upenn.edu mailing list to facilitate the exchange of information on upcoming conferences and publication opportunities, and archives of the postings were later made available on the Web. Since that time, the CFP mailing list has grown to over 6,500 subscribers from allover the world. The CFP list and web archive were founded by Jack Lynch. The current CFP editor is Erika Lin. If you have any questions, please contact Erika Lin at: elin@english.upenn.edu