Organising a Specialist Conference

Think carefully about what your proposed conference is trying to achieve. It may be that you have been doing some work in a particular area for a while, and want to bring together people with a variety of views from within the field, so as to build a research network in order to do more work, and in order to apply to funding bodies. The benefits of organising an academic conference are wide-ranging. Some of these benefits are to be expected, and flow naturally and directly from organising and then attending the event, others are unexpected. You may, for example, meet somebody who has a completely different take on the subject, which you want to pursue, or the contacts you make may lead to invitations to do collaborative work.