This summer, I had the privilege of participating in the summer conference season for the first time as a presenter. Presenting three papers at two conferences was both fun and intimidating as I traveled new roads and familiar ones and met with countless new faces and some old ones. However, the experience as a whole was incredible, and it has left me excited for SBL this fall.
My first stop this summer was Amsterdam. I had heard that the city was beautiful and had wanted to visit it for some time. It did not disappoint. The canals and striking old buildings served as a lovely backdrop to my first major conference presentation--and made the presentation feel all the more intimidating. The first day of ISBL, I was already presenting! However, presenting in the same session as Triantafillos helped to calm my nerves, and it quickly became a fun experience. While I have other projects on the Septuagint in the works, this was my first foray into the field. I took the familiar tools of narrative focalization into the unfamiliar territory of Ruth and Judith. The attendees of the session, many of whom were long-time Septuagint scholars, received me warmly and ran with my ideas to produce a fascinating and enjoyable discussion during the Q/A. While presenting on the first day was intimidating, it also meant that I was free to enjoy the rest of the conference, and I did. I met so many new people, including other New Testament scholars from Regensburg, Germany and Nashville, TN, USA. I traveled all the way to Amsterdam to meet people who lived within a couple hours of my current home and my hometown! I also met others from all over the world and reconnected with old acquaintances as well. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Amsterdam, from the papers, both presenting and listening, to the conversations over coffee, dinner, and Van Gogh paintings.
My second conference this summer was the British New Testament Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Where Amsterdam was one new experience after another, Glasgow was a return to the familiar. While I thoroughly enjoy living in Germany, it was wonderful to visit Scotland again. After four years in Edinburgh, I immediately felt at home surrounded by the towering stonework of the University of Glasgow. Even the dreary weather felt nostalgic in contrast to the summer heatwave in Munich. Once I arrived at the conference, the people were just as familiar. I was surrounded by old colleagues and professors, including my doctoral supervisor Paul Foster. It was wonderful to catch up with everyone, almost exactly a year since I had left. However, I also found BNTS to be somewhat intimidating as I had not one but two papers to present. The first, an analysis of narrative focalization in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, was uniquely exciting and intimidating as it was the first time that I presented before my doctoral supervisor since graduating. I found in him and the rest of the Synoptic seminar an engaging and encouraging audience, and I thoroughly enjoyed their feedback and questions--including Paul’s all-too-familiar ability to immediately pinpoint the primary weakness in my argument. However, in the midst of the familiarity, I also had many new experiences. My second presentation, a narratological analysis of Acts 22:22-29, brought me before several unfamiliar faces in the Acts seminar. However, they were just as encouraging as the Synoptics crowd, and, both in the Acts seminar and the conference as a whole, I was able to make several new friends over papers and coffees as I did in Amsterdam.
All in all, my first summer conference season as a presenter was a wonderful experience. I was able to meet so many new people and catch up with old acquaintances. I was able to explore both new places and familiar ones. And of course, I was able, for the first time, to properly share my work with other New Testament scholars and enjoy the engagement of their feedback. I now look forward to presenting two more papers in San Diego at SBL. I will be presenting “Unifying Micro-narratives in Galatians through Narrative Focalization” in the Cognitive Linguistics section on November 24, and “Tracing the Shadows: The Implicit and Explicit Gospel Narrative in Paul's Contested Epistles” in the Disputed Pauline Epistles section on November 25. If you are interested in these topics, I’d be happy to see you there.
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