Done

Not quite ten hours ago, I returned from my twenty-third conference presentation. Moments thereafter I added the line to my CV. It will take me about a week to unpack my luggage, a small, non-hipster messenger-type carry-on.

Call it superstition, but I do not list presentations on my CV until I have actually presented or moderated—I mean, suppose my plane had crashed on the way to Mighty Land Grant University? Yet I have no qualms listing “forthcoming” publications or even invited talks I haven’t yet given. Yeah, call it superstition, because it is not rational at all.

What is rational, however, is my decision to quit presenting at conferences, at least for now. I’ll still accept invitations to chair panels, and I will attend conferences to peddle my book once I shepherd the cursed thing into print. This decision saddens me, because I used to love presenting at conferences.

That love, such as it is, has been supplanted by a vicarious one. So far, I have never failed to be thrilled to meet my grad students as they return from their first conferences, aglow with excitement and ambition. Unshackled from TA duties and my oppressive nitpickery, they are free to parry questions, to hear their own voices in the conversation, to shine as scholars in their own right. (This last, by the way, is why I do not drag students with me to my conferences.) After two years of guiding grad students as they convert conference papers into publications, the thrill shows no sign of abating.

I remember vividly what it was like to experience that thrill firsthand. Eight years ago to the day next week, in fact, I presented my first paper. It was an absurdly specialized international conference. I knew not to run the proposal by my advisor, who—being an introvert who loathes conferences and is unimpressed by them on the curricula vitae of even very novice scholars—was indifferent when I delivered the post mortem.

Still jet lagged when I arrived overseas at this conference, I discovered that the other two members of the panel were senior scholars, whose publications have been the occasion of quite massive deforestation. Our panel was in the first set of sessions. Therefore, the audience was standing room only. Good thing, then, that I was so anxious about sharing my dissertation with people outside my grad department that I learned my paper by heart, so that I could do the police in different voices. I mades their flesh creep. Just kidding. But I did leave with a pocketful of business cards and a much more modest bunch of invitations to publish the paper. (For what it’s worth, I regret having accepted one of them, since, once the dissertation was all said and done, I no longer accept the argument of my first article.)

What was so empowering about that first paper, however, was neither my hammy delivery nor my mad research skillz. Rather, it was dealing with a hostile question.

Just as my copanelists were eminences, so were many members of the audience. One of them, who didn’t wear a nametag because she had arrived late, plus everyone else already knew her on sight, directed the first question to me. It was, basically, “So what?”—only more elegantly phrased and uttered in a quaint accent. She crossed her arms and seemed to scowl. The room fell silent. I smiled, reiterated, and elaborated. She grudgingly assented when I asked if I had answered her question. And then the conversation flew. It was collegial and informative. It was awesome.

I learned the identity of my interrogator over lunch with some senior scholars who had deigned to let me join them. One remarked that it was bad form to treat a student that way, and that he was particularly surprised that my interrogator, whose scholarship analyzes power, would behave in that manner. As it turns out, I knew her scholarship well. Let’s just say that I was immeasurably grateful that its author wasn’t wearing her nametag. Had she done so, I would have ended my career right there.

As it is, we’re all cordial and stuff now. Since we, like, live in different countries, it’s not like we’re BFFs, though we do meet up if we happen to be attending the same conference. I’ve seen my name share bibliographies and syllabi with hers.

Much more importantly, the “hostile” question was a fundamental, if obvious one: out of habit now, I try always to foreground, in both my research and my teaching, what is at stake. Like a religious fanatic, I want to tell you and tell you and tell you.

As I’ve become a faculty member, however, I find myself feeling less and less challenged, and learning less, from not only the papers I’m hearing, but also the responses to my own research. This is a shame, since preparing for and going to conferences takes such time and energy. What’s more, I really believe what I tell students on the rare occasions that I need to miss class to attend a conference: that, like all professors, I am a super-nerd, and that conferences are one of our ways of going to class.

The sorts of questions I get these days are along the lines of asking me for suggestions on what to read, in addition to invitations to publish in non-refereed essay collections that have not found publishers. (These are a special kind of purgatory.) The most common question, however, is “when and where can I get this book?”

That’s an excellent question. Actually, I wish you’d say, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Have you even thought of approaching the question through Q and R?” Then we can have a conversation. Thank you, all the same. But I think I’m done here.