by Tingcong Lin

The School regularly organizes professionalization workshops, in which faculty members are invited to give talks on career-enhancement skills for postgraduate students. On May 10th, 2023, Dr. Anjuli Gunaratne was invited to give a talk on “Applying to and presenting at conferences.” Dr. Gunaratne has extensive experience of presenting at conferences across the US, the Caribbean, Europe, South and (South-)East Asia. During her talk, she offered valuable guidance and advice on giving conference presentations of various kinds, drawing from her personal experiences. She also provided specific suggestions for our on-going conference preparations on a case-by-case basis.

In general, Dr. Gunaratne suggested seeing conference presentations as performances, in which presenters, as performers, should always bear in mind their audience. It is the responsibility of presenters to take into consideration the diversity of their audience, and to make sure that sufficient basic knowledge on the topic at hand is provided before deeper analyses are tackled in the talk. Also, it is important for any presenter to connect with the collective interests of an audience as well as with the key themes of a conference.

Dr. Gunaratne specifically emphasized that drafting a presentation differs significantly from writing a thesis or an article. Presenters should not attempt to cover all details, cutting and pasting sentences from their thesis. Instead, they should condense the draft by highlighting certain parts while simplifying and abandoning others. In particular, she advised using shorter sentences when writing presentation drafts. Her main piece of advice in this regard was to treat a conference paper as one would a script.

Although conference presentations are like performances and can sometimes be frustrating, Dr. Gunaratne suggested that the process of preparing presentations and attending conferences can be beneficial to our academic growth in multiple ways, especially in the long term. Writing concise abstracts and presentation drafts helps us to reflect on our own research, particularly on how to prioritize some components over others given a specific context (like a conference’s CFP). When encountering different audiences and engaging in various discussions at multiple conferences, we get the opportunity to think beyond our own research and field and learn from related disciplines. Doing presentations as well as answering questions at conferences also provides us with valuable chances to practice discussing our research with others and to be better prepared for our job talks in the future.

During the talk and in the subsequent Q&A session, we also shared our own experiences, discussed our concerns, and posed some questions. Dr. Gunaratne offered us inspiring responses and warm encouragement. Many of us were uncertain if our research spoke to the themes of the conferences that we wanted to attend. Dr. Gunaratne encouraged us to identify connections between our research and a broader audience, and to proactively reach out to others in academic circles and to pursue different opportunities. She also encouraged us to organize or co-organize panels at conferences and recounted her experiences doing so, including one that became the basis of her recently published guest-edited special issue of the renowned postcolonial studies journal Interventions, which is entitled “The Rise of Global Anglophone.” All participants considered the talk very informative, insightful, and inspiring.