Three Societies 2008: Guidelines for Themed Panel Organisers

Contacting us

All queries will be dealt with by a representative of the Programmes Committee. Please contact us (preferably) by email at 3socs2008@bshs.org.uk, or by post at 3 Societies 2008, School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK.

Constructing your panel

The theme of the meeting is Connecting Disciplines. Sessions are invited that reflect this broad theme and participants are encouraged to respond to the diverse meanings it has for historians of science, technology and medicine and their colleagues in the wider scholarly community.

Each panel proposal should be submitted by a nominated organiser, who will serve as primary contact and will be responsible for the content and organisation of the session overall.

The organisers are particularly keen to encourage sessions that

• include participants from more than one institution and/or nation
• promote the interaction of junior and senior scholars
• and will take these factors into account in making panel selections.

Each session (90 minutes to two hours) will normally include either three or four papers. Organisers who believe there is a strong case for departing from this rule or who wish to submit a session of a different type, eg round-table are welcome to discuss this with us in advance of the Call for Papers deadline. Papers within a session may be co-authored or co-presented, but each paper will receive an equal time allocation (usually from 20 to 30 minutes including questions.)

Panels may be proposed to run over two sessions, and thus feature six to eight papers, provided they demonstrate a clear and ambitious agenda. Longer proposals should not be submitted.

Additionally, organisers are welcome (but not required) to include a commentator/discussant. Each panel will also include a chair, who will be responsible for keeping the panellists to time and taking questions. Proposals including named chairs are encouraged, although we can make chairing arrangements locally.

No speaker may present papers in more than one session at this conference (this restriction does not apply to the designated Outreach and Education sessions.) Presenters in one session are welcome to commentate or chair in another.

Guidelines for submission

Organisers are welcome to discuss their ideas with us, and seek suggestions for participants, in advance of the Call for Papers deadline. Formal panel proposals should be complete and agreed on by all the named participants, and should include

• a brief description (maximum 150 words) of the panel’s aims. This should make clear how your proposed session addresses the conference theme.
• an individual abstract for each paper in the panel, submitted according to the guidelines for individual proposals (maximum of 250 words; no footnotes; comprehensible to a non-specialist audience)
• full contact details for the organiser and for all session participants including named chairs and commentators.
• Details of any specific audio visual requirements for your session

Your panel proposals should be sent as a single submission from the panel organiser, if possible in the form of a single electronic document.

In order that we can publicise the conference as effectively as possible, we will assume that in submitting an abstract, each participant is granting us the right to publish its content on the Society’s website and elsewhere: if you do not wish your abstract to be publicised, please advise us explicitly. Where appropriate, we may contact you seeking further information for use in conference press releases.

All participants in a themed session must pre-register for the conference in order to be included in the conference program.

Withdrawing a proposal

If you wish to withdraw an entire panel proposal, please notify us as soon as possible.

If one member of a panel wishes to withdraw, organisers are encouraged to seek a suitable replacement; if this cannot be done, we reserve the right to move a paper from elsewhere into the session. Panels with less than three papers will be withdrawn, but the remaining papers maybe considered for inclusion as individual papers in other panels.