Every year or two, someone who has never done it before decides to assemble and host an academic conference: a graduate student, or a group of students, or a group of students and faculty members. And each time, they have to learn a lot of organizational and administrative details, mostly by word of mouth, by osmosis, by asking people who have done it before. We've done this ourselves, and we'd like to assemble some of that knowledge in one place to make things easier the next time around.

So here are some of the tasks you'll need to accomplish if you want to host a conference. Don't despair; it's a large task, but an approachable one, especially if you have some sense of the requirements before you start. And note that not all of these tasks are strictly sequential: some of them might need to be accomplished concurrently (for instance, you'll need to secure some funding before you invite a keynote speaker).

1. Have an idea. Discuss it with faculty and other students; decide who will be organizing the conference, and make sure that all the prospective organizers have approximately equal commitment to the task. It's better to discover now that one of your co-organizers won't have time next spring to read dozens of abstracts and papers, rather than to discover it later, and have to pick up the slack for them while they share your credit!
2. Draft a Call for Papers (CFP). This will serve as your first announcement of the conference to potential participants, and also to potential funders, so make it sound as exciting, as juicy and novel, as appealing as you can. Common CFP problems include narrowness (which might discourage good submissions), negativity (which might discourage or insult people working in your field), and dullness (which will discourage everyone). Look at some examples of other calls for papers by perusing the UPenn CFP mailing list archives.
   • You may also want to create a Web site and/or get an email address for the conference at this point. OIT says it gives student organizations Princeton "NetIDs" (that is, user accounts with email and web privileges), but they are sometimes difficult to deal with, and the application process is structured for undergraduate student groups. You may get better results if you deal with them in person, rather than expecting prompt replies to email or phone requests.
3. Pick a date for the conference. Try to avoid conflicts with other departments' events as well as your own; peruse their web sites, ask their students, faculty, and department secretaries what is planned for the next semester. No scheduling conflicts will mean better attendance and possibly better funding for your conference. Pick a deadline for submissions, at least six weeks or two months before the conference date.
   • You'll also want to decide on a format, and a rough schedule, for the conference. Do you want to schedule several panels concurrently, so you can invite more presenters, at the risk of dividing your audience? Or do you prefer to only select the number of papers which can all fit in one or two days? How much time will you allow for presenters to read papers, and how much time for questions and answers? Figure out roughly how many presenters you would like, and how long you want their papers to be, and put this information in your CFP.
   • You might also want to think about alternative models for academic events, rather than the usual conference at which scholars read out their prepared papers and take questions afterward. Other formats, like "workshops" or "symposia," can cut down on reading out loud and make the conference more conversational. Be sure to make it clear in your CFP if you are soliciting contributions of a different sort than the usual conference paper.
4. Solicit funding. Send letters and copies of your drafted CFP to department and program chairs who might be interested in co-sponsoring your conference (based on its topic). Ask around the English department for colloquium and graduate-student-group funding which might be available. Try to get a faculty member, preferably one with connections, to make calls to these other departments as well; don't depend on getting funded on the merits of your conference proposal alone, but try to be "networked" also. It will help to have some idea of your budget; ask advice from faculty about this.
   • Major expenses often include food (several hundred dollars), printing and mailing posters and flyers (up to a couple of thousand dollars), and speakers' fees, travel, and lodging (potentially huge; for even a very modest keynote speaker's fee plus travel, you'll need at least a thousand dollars). If you'll need a lot of money for expenses like a keynote speaker, you may need to secure a fair part of your funding before you can do anything else. If you'll only need money for food at a small one-day graduate student conference, you can probably count on the department to come up with a bare minimum for you (though it never hurts to ask around as well).
5. Send out your CFP at least a few months in advance. At a minimum, send it by email to the UPenn CFP list. If you have a long lead time (at least half a year), consider advertising or announcing your conference in PMLA or other relevant journals, or circulating it to other universities by email or post.
   • Before sending out your CFP, be sure it makes clear what kind of submissions you are expecting. If you've asked for abstracts as well as completed papers, you may want to specify a length or a minimum number of words; otherwise, people may send you abstracts so brief and vague that you can't really assess their quality.
6. Receive submissions. Acknowledge the submissions as they come in; nobody likes sending a paper or an abstract and hearing nothing in response. In your acknowledgement, tell the submitters when they should expect to hear from you (pick a date a week or two after the deadline, so you allow yourself enough time to assess contributions and invite participants). After you send them your acceptance, be sure you confirm the invitees' commitment to attend. And don't forget to send a polite note to the submitters you do not choose to invite to your event; you may want to encourage them to attend in the audience, especially if they are located nearby.
7. Generate publicity materials for the conference. A glossy, color poster will help keep up appearances, if your funding allows it. If you don't like the idea of designing your own poster, you can often ask around for an architecture graduate student who will design it and supervise printing for a few hundred dollars. If the poster doesn't include the names of all the speakers, you will also want a printed program by the day of the conference: presenters will often want tangible proof of their contribution, and attendees will want to remember who and what they saw.
   • You may want to mail posters and publicity materials, in order to generate more interest and better attendance. The MLA rents its mailing lists, both of individual members and of department heads. Pricing is fairly reasonable, though postage will often be prohibitive. The MLA's minimum order is 1,000 addresses; we've found that this corresponds approximately to the number of department heads of English and foreign languages, at four-year institutions, in our region (NJ, NY, PA, CT, MA, MD, DC). You can ask them for an estimated count of your custom list by email, and have the final list delivered electronically or in the form of peel-and-stick labels.
   • Also, consider sending your posters and polished publicity materials to publishers, especially nearby New York-based publishers. They will sometimes send a representative to attend one of our conferences in order to assess its publishability in person. Ask supportive faculty members to help you find contacts at publishers. We are told that edited anthologies of conference papers are generally out of favor with academic publishers, but your conference might be the lucky exception!
8. Reserve a room through the Registrar's Office; confirm your reservation well in advance. This can take weeks, and you will probably need to follow up your room request at least once to remind them to take care of it. Arrange for any necessary multimedia support.
   • It's worth getting a room where you can set up morning and afternoon coffee/tea/snacks, possibly as well as lunch, outside. Good places include McCormick (which is the Art Gallery), and the Friends Center and the new Computer Science building also have great conference spaces.
9. Make arrangements for catering, reservations for a dinner, and arrange travel and lodging if you are funding these for any of your conference participants.
10. Host the conference. Enjoy. Be sure to record it on your CV.
11. Share your experience with other graduate students when they foolishly decide to follow in your footsteps.