At these meetings, graduate students and professors distributed and presented draft chapters and seminar papers, followed by comment and discussion by members of the group. Later, we invited visiting scholars to lead workshops on their current research. Our first conference was a modest affair. Three students from UCSB presented papers to members of the history and political science departments, with an individual faculty commentator for each paper. By the third year we attracted an even wider spectrum of participants, including graduate students from various universities across the United States and the United Kingdom.
Several factors make our conferences unique.
First, they are graduate student events. Graduate students are responsible for planning and organizing the conference, and all the papers are presented by graduate students. We also strive to ensure that graduate students receive the maximum feedback possible. Further, we schedule the presentations to allow plenty of time for group discussion. Although the conference is designed especially to meet the needs of graduate students, we also want to provide a forum useful to established scholars.