AAR-HCS

The AAR has recently updated its website. We will soon update this page with a step-by-step guide to submitting a paper proposal online (the old step-by-step guide, most of which is still more or less accurate, is archived here).

If you are considering submitting a proposal for a paper, panel, or session, please do so! We publish a detailed call for papers soon after each year's annual meetings, but sometimes our most interesting sessions come together serendipitously, as a result of proposals only loosely connected with the CFP. So, even if your topic doesn't seem to fit this year's CFP, you may want to submit it nonetheless.

When you submit a proposal to us, you will need to supply two items: a plan of the proposed work (a thousand words or less) and an abstract (usually around a hundred words). Once we have received all the proposals, they are reviewed "blind" (i.e., without any identifying information, such as names or institutions) by the five members of the AAR-HCS steering committee, who then make recommendations to the section co-chairs. The co-chairs, working from the steering committee's recommendations, assemble a slate of sessions. Those sessions may be of several types. Most typically, we select complementary individual papers from among the proposals and fit them together into a coherent panel. We occasionally receive proposals for full panels or for complete paper sessions; we welcome such submissions and use them when we can. In addition, we sometimes pre-arrange full sessions around a specific theme, such as a recent book.

For reference, here is a rough timetable for submissions. It is subject to change every year, so you should always rely on the information provided on the AAR's website.

November: Annual Meeting
December: Call for Papers published
March: Deadline for proposals
April: Proposers notified of acceptance or rejection
June: Annual Meeting participants must register for meeting
September: Program Book available

If you are planning a proposal, here are a few things to keep in mind, to maximize the chances that your paper will be accepted.

• Your paper should have a clearly discernible historical focus. Papers that deal with the history of theological ideas or liturgical practices are welcome, of course, but work that is strictly theological in character is probably more appropriate for another program unit. The same is true, generally speaking, for work that presupposes a confessional perspective. AAR-HCS sessions are geared towards a diverse scholarly audience.

• Remember that AAR-HCS is one of the AAR's larger program units and that its mandate involves broad thematic coverage. Your paper will be more likely to be accepted if its relevance to the wider field of the History of Christianity is clear to nonspecialists. The steering committee and co-chairs may not be familiar with the details of your period or with your geographical or textual specialty. If possible, try to make your work interesting and accessible to a general scholarly audience. In proposals, use specialized language -- such as non-English terms or highly technical vocabulary -- only when it is really necessary.

• A common problem with proposals is that they seem to describe overly ambitious papers, i.e., papers that set out to accomplish too much for the available time. (Less commonly, they are insufficiently ambitious and set out to achieve too little.) Almost all of AAR-HCS's sessions are scheduled with the assumption that papers will last no longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, and your proposal should reflect this. If you are unaccustomed to presenting papers at academic conferences, you may need to experiment a little to see what will fit. A twenty-minute paper is typically in the neighborhood of 3000 words.

Once your proposal is submitted, you can expect to hear from us in the late spring with a definitive acceptance or rejection.

If your proposal was rejected and you cannot figure out why, please bear in mind that we receive many more proposals in a given year than we are able to use. We are ordinarily unable to provide feedback on individual proposals.

It happens all too often that a stellar proposal will be rejected simply because it cannot be made to fit rationally into any of the available session slots. For this reason, however, resubmissions of previously resubmitted proposals are permitted. Such proposals are treated no differently than proposals we are seeing for the first time, and the second (or sometimes even the third) time, we may be able to find an suitable space in the program for your work.

Good luck, and we look forward to hearing from you.

last updated 1 month ago # fine print   nathan rein 2006