Have fun, everybody who's at SAA! I keep seeing posts about it all over Facebook and blogs, and I'm a bit envious, while at the same time aware there are all sorts of reasons why it wasn't a particularly good idea for me to go this year. Will DEFINITELY be at the next two, which are both local-ish.
A thought: conferences are a totally different experience when you're grown-up faculty than when you're a grad student. Back then, it was all about building the CV, and I went to a lot of random conferences, and didn't enjoy most of them very much because I always felt weird and wallflowerish. My real peers were at home, where there was always a lively cohort of other grad students, and no shortage of early modernists, whether grad students or faculty.
Now, I don't give a damn about building the CV, I go to SAA (sometimes) and Kalamazoo (most years) and that's about it, and conferences are all about 1) hanging out with one particular cohort of friends; 2) being around other people who are geeky about the same kinds of things I'm geeky about; and 3) being immersed in medieval / early modern stuff, and learning odd and random things about it. When you're the lone early modernist on campus, the immersion is a rare and unexpected pleasure; in grad school, it was something I took for granted.
The grown-up kind of conferencing, need I say, is SO much more fun. Only six weeks to Kalamazoo!
