Upon landing in Albuquerque to attend my first WHA, I felt something that had, at this point in my graduate school career, become so rare as to be almost unrecognizable: total preparedness for a conference. My luggage was packed with an appropriate number of clothes and shoes, none of which would be extraneous; business cards had been placed in a card holder for easy access; a budget had been pre-approved by my graduate program (a true bureaucratic feat); and emails to students anxious about an impending paper had been all sent in the airport, alongside an out-of-office notice. I had the schedule outlined in my personal calendar, the panels ranked in order of what I wanted to see, the tickets for receptions, lists of scholars I hoped to chat with. My planning would undoubtedly pay off, I thought, as I grabbed a quick burrito in the Albuquerque airport before heading to the conference hotel.  

That airport burrito (which, I would later learn, had a very particular reputation among the Albuquerqueans I met at the conference) supplanted my carefully laid plans with a brief but severe stomach bug and nausea for the rest of the week. After missing the opening panel, I’d thought that surely I’d feel better in time to go to the next morning’s panels, or the panels after that – but each attempt ended in a meek return to my hotel room to drink Ginger-Ale and eat Saltines. As a result, I spent much of my first WHA – a conference I hoped would become my intellectual home – feeling physically awful, and doing little of what I had intended. What on earth, then, might I have to say about what I learned about the WHA, and what the graciousness of the WHA’s graduate student prize committee afforded me professionally?  

While I did not get to experience as many opportunities as I’d wanted to, the fruitful professional experiences I did have more than made up for my physical discomfort. Instructive meetings with press editors interested in my paper gave me a sense of how I might approach the dissertation with an eye towards the book project it will become, and a particular roundtable on carceral history – “Social Control’s Ideologies and the Carceral State” – furthered my thinking of my own project on incarceration. At the awards ceremony, I connected with scholars and students I’d met throughout the conference and learned about the exceptional work that they do. My conference was not the experience I’d envisioned, but I did achieve many of the self-defined goals that constituted a “productive” conference in my mind: meet other scholars, deepen my understanding of the field, and get better at articulating my own projects with clarity and confidence. 

And yet I also think that my strange WHA experience – though I would not recommend it to anyone – stirred up important considerations of how I have defined “success” in conference settings in the past. As I stewed in my hotel room, I asked myself many questions. What was I missing, at its most fundamental level, and how could I rebuild it later? Was it mere exposure to important scholars, or practice in presenting, or the ability “keep up” with the field, or all of the above? I have often felt discomforted at the imperative to maximize quantity, not quality, in conferences as a graduate student: more conversations, more people at your panel, more hands you shake, ad nauseum. I have usually accepted that the intangible parts of conferences I enjoy the most – experiencing a new place and its history, being in community with other historians – are good and even meaningful things to have, but not part of what makes a conference a professional success.  

As soon as I could hold down food and water, I boarded the bus for the Tasting New Mexico tour, determined not to miss one of the events I was most excited to attend. At the Los Ranchos Agri-Nature Center, our group enjoyed a beautiful meal with the doors open to the autumn breeze. The accompanying panel on the chile pepper’s history and future deepened our food’s context and meaning. Later, we meandered around the farm. We learned to husk corn, mill it into flour, and press it into tortillas; we learned how to distinguish between flavors in squash, beans, and chile varieties. We talked a bit about scholarship in between, but mostly about what we were tasting and seeing and thinking about. I enjoyed my time in conversation, eating good food, laughing. I wondered if this might be, in some ways, a part of scholarship, rather than something that I had arbitrarily constructed as separate from it. 

On the last day of the conference, I presented my paper and heard about the excellent research of my co-panelists. I most enjoyed the conversations that spilled over the panel’s allotted time, leaving the confines of the Q&A and turning toward the personal and meaningful while maintaining intellectual rigor. I know that I missed out on many experiences while being sick for so much of the conference, and I worried at first that I would leave the WHA bearing none of the standard markers of “successful” conferencing I’d imposed on myself. Yet I get a sense that the experiences I did have in Albuquerque this year – the conversations, and food, and community-building – are the beating heart of the conference and its community. Those things are hard to describe; they do not make for neatly reported successes on budget reports or in department newsletters. And yet they are what will compel me to return to the WHA next year, and for many years to come.