Roundtable on Participating in Conferences as a Graduate Student
With Lauren Mancia, Anna Siebach-Larsen, and R.D. Perry
Hosted by Vagantes Board Mentorship & Professionalization Representative Danny Berman in advance of the Vagantes 2026 Conference at the University of Rochester.
Thursday, February 12th, 1–2 pm EST, on Zoom.
Have you ever wondered how to best prepare for attending and participating in academic conferences? Or how can you, as an attendee and/or participant, make the most of your conference experience?
Please join the Vagantes community for an informative roundtable discussion with Lauren Mancia (History, City University of New York), Anna Siebach-Larsen (Director of Robbins Library, University of Rochester), and R.D. Perry (English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville), on attending conferences in your graduate student career. The roundtable will cover topics such as preparing for Q&As, effectively describing your research in casual conversation, and how to use conferencing opportunities as foundations for your later career.
Zoom Link: https://gc-cuny-edu.
More on our guest speakers and their publications:
Dr. Lauren Mancia (she/her) teaches medieval history at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has published numerous books, including Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester University Press, 2019); Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling Toward God, (Arc Humanities Press, 2023); and most recently, Embodied Epistemology as Rigorous Historical Method (Cambridge Element, Histories of Emotions and the Senses series, 2025). Professor Mancia is active in the wider CUNY medievalist community, particularly in the Late Antique-Medieval-Early Modern Faculty Working Group (LAMEM) at Brooklyn College.
Dr. Anna Siebach-Larsen (she/they) is Director of the Rossell Hope Robbins Library and Koller-Collins Center for English Studies at the University of Rochester. Anna supports interdisciplinary research in Medieval Studies, including literature, art history, history, paleography, history of the book, and digital humanities, and has curatorial responsibility for RCL’s premodern manuscript and printed book collections. In addition to medieval studies, Anna supports graduate and undergraduate work in literary and cultural studies through the Koller-Collins Center for English Studies, and serves as the Executive Director of the Middle English Text Series (METS).
Dr. R.D. Perry (he/him) teaches medieval and early modern literature at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His first book is entitled Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: Chaucer to Spenser (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). He has edited several collections including: Literatures of the Hundred Years War, Edt. with Daniel Davies (Manchester University Press, 2024); Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages, Edt. with Benjamin Saltzman (Cambridge University Press, 2022); and Charles d’Orléans’ English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of ‘Fortunes Stabilnes’, Edt. with Mary-Jo Arn (Boydell Press, 2020).