Innocents Abroad: A Graduate Student Perspective on the 2003 SEA Conference

"It's a good time to be an early Americanist," explained SEA president Philip Gould in his opening address to the society's third biennial meeting, held April 10-12, at the Providence Marriott in Providence, Rhode Island. Gould elaborated on the current state of the field, describing it as "dynamic" and in the process of a "radical transformation of what we do." Now inclusive of Spanish and Francophone literatures, Caribbean studies, and transatlantic work, our discipline challenges us to develop an increasingly "multicultural and multilingual" methodology. While this speech addressed all of the 189 early Americanist attendees, it spoke particularly to the concerns of the 39 graduate students who helped make up that total. As graduate students, we face the problem of how to work our way in from the margins of the profession, how to get a sense of the larger field and our future role in it. Gould's remarks both laid out what trajectory our research and teaching might take in the next few decades and prefigured the conference experience as a whole for us. The SEA conference provides graduate students with an unparalleled opportunity to gain access to the field: its current critical issues, its most recent scholarship, its conversations, its people, even its libraries and archives.

The panels served as the most obvious point of access to the field. They not only exposed us to current critical debates and scholarship but also allowed us a means to enter these conversations. The graduate students we interviewed all rated the panel quality above that of early Americanist panels at other conferences they had attended. Conferences devoted to a longer chronology of American studies tend to relegate colonial and early periods to a few panels running simultaneously. And, because of their more generalist context, the presentations require prefatory material that can speak to nonspecialists. The SEA panels, however, offered the refreshing opportunity to move immediately and efficiently to the core of a critical debate and to engage with experts in the field who could challenge or nuance our arguments. We never left a panel without writing down at least one new title for our bibliographies. We also frequently saw graduate students ask questions during the discussions or stay afterward to speak with the panelists. Faculty seemed interested in interacting with us, and we walked away from the conference with several business cards in hand.

The conference gave us additional opportunities to extend the conversation beyond the panels. Most colleges and universities tend to have a small contingent of early Americanists, and bringing so many of us together into one conference bridges that isolation. This social inclusion becomes crucial for graduate students who are trying to break into the field. One student, relaxing in the hotel pool, commented that the greatest benefit the SEA conference afforded us was to help "incorporate us into networks." Two receptions, one at the Marriott and one at the home of two Brown University faculty members, facilitated informal interaction with other academics, book publishers, journal editors, archivists, and independent scholars. There, we established publishing contacts and gleaned the latest information on exciting new texts, grants, and research fellowships.

Graduate students willing to brave the cold April rain found Providence itself a tremendous educational resource. Many of us met with Rick Ring at the John Carter Brown Library, for example, where we learned in concrete ways how to conduct efficient archival research that would answer Gould's call for a multilingual, multicultural American studies. With its extensive collection of trans-hemispheric materials, the library appears a particularly appropriate archive to contextualize this conference. Outside of Brown University and its libraries, the city of Providence contains living history: the Athenaeum, one of the oldest lending libraries in the nation (where Poe courted Sarah Helen Whitman); historic Benefit Street; the oldest Baptist church in America; and the John Brown House. For starving graduate students, Providence offered physical as well as intellectual sustenance. From Hemenway's oysters to the Blue Fin Grill's puff pastries, we all ate well. Costs, however, occasionally drained the limited resources...