The 42nd GSA Conference in Pittsburgh, PA (September 27-30, 2018) will continue to host a series of seminars in addition to conference sessions and roundtables.
Seminars meet for all three days of the conference. They explore new avenues of academic exchange and foster extended discussion, rigorous intellectual debate, and intensified networking. Seminars are typically proposed and led by two to three conveners and they consist of 12 to 20 participants, including scholars from different disciplines and at different career stages. Seminars may enable extended discussion of a recent academic publication; the exploration of a promising new research topic; engagement with pre-circulated papers; an opportunity to debate the work of scholars with different approaches; the coming together of groups of scholars seeking to develop an anthology; or the in-depth discussion of a political or public policy issue, novel, film, poem, artwork, or musical piece.
In order to facilitate extended discussion, seminar conveners and participants should participate in all three seminar meetings. Please note that seminar conveners and seminar applicants who have been accepted for seminar participation will not be allowed to submit a paper in a regular panel session. However, they may take on one additional role in the conference as moderator or commentator on another session independent of their enrollment in a seminar, or they may participate in a roundtable.
Although we accept proposals from conveners who have directed a seminar during the past two consecutive years, we give preference to newcomers and thus encourage the rotation of seminar conveners in similarly-themed seminars. We further recommend that those conveners contact the coordinators of the Interdisciplinary Network Committee, Professors Pamela Potter (pmpotter@wisc.edu) and Winson Chu (wchu@uwm.edu), to establish an official GSA Network on their topic.
The application process has two steps. Initially, we invite you to submit a preliminary proposal that includes the following items:
- Title
- Names of conveners
- A 150-word description of the seminar's subject (which will eventually be used in the call for participants, the printed program, and the online program/mobile app)
- A 50-word description of the format of the seminar (which will also appear in the call for participants, etc.)
These items are due by November 13, 2017. Please submit your application online at https://www.xcdsystem.com/gsa. Your username and password are the same ones you use to log in to your GSA profile at https://thegsa.org/members/profile.
Please note that you must be a current member of the GSA to submit a proposal. If you need your password reset, please contact Ms. Ursula Gray (UG@press.jhu.edu) at Johns Hopkins University Press. If technical questions or problems arise with the submission interface itself, please contact Elizabeth Fulton at techsupport@thegsa.org.
At this point, the GSA Seminar Committee will provide suggestions and assistance for the final submission, which is due by December 13, 2017. The committee will then review seminar proposals and post a list of approved seminars and their topics on the GSA website by early January 2018.
The GSA Seminar Committee consists of:
Margaret Eleanor Menninger (Texas State University) | mm48@txstate.edu (Chair)
Maria Mitchell (Franklin & Marshall College) | maria.mitchell@fandm.edu
Faye Stewart (Georgia State University) | fayestewart@gsu.edu
Please direct all inquiries to all three of us.