The American Musicological Society (AMS) will introduce a new session type at the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting in Chicago. The new session type, called a “paper forum,” is a variant of the classic paper panel. As in a traditional AMS paper panel, “paper forums” are composed of three (3) papers that have been accepted for placement on the AMS Annual Meeting program after a competitive review process by the AMS Program Committee.

However, unlike the traditional paper panel, the newly introduced “paper forums” will include a discussant. The discussant, who will be assigned from a pool of volunteer discussants, will review the papers in advance of the conference and provide learned commentary and feedback for both the audience and the authors during the session. In addition, the discussants assigned to “paper forum” sessions will be expected to pose meaningful questions to the authors during the Q&A, if questions are not forthcoming from the audience.

The purpose of this new session type is to more closely match the experience of paper presenters who collaborate with colleagues on pre-organized sessions. When compared with traditional paper panels, pre-organized sessions often provide a richer collegial experience for presenters, one with opportunities for connection before the meeting and more substantive feedback on papers during and after the meeting. The goal of the new “paper forum” session type is to better approximate that experience. If successful, the new session type should facilitate more targeted feedback for presenters (helping to advance conference presentations to publishable articles), and more useful context and commentary that enriches the experience for both authors and audiences. The new session type will also provide opportunities for interested and qualified volunteers to serve not merely as chairs at the AMS annual meeting, but also as discussants.

Because of the addition of a discussant, the new “paper forums,” like most pre-organized sessions, will have a slightly different format. The Q&A for all presenters will occur collectively at the end of the panel, rather than individually after each paper presentation and paper presentations will be slightly shortened from a maximum of 20 minutes to a maximum of 18 minutes. Discussants will have 10 minutes to provide commentary, and the Q&A will be held in the final 20 minutes of the session. Moreover, to ensure that discussants have reasonable time to review paper presentations before the conference, paper presenters will be asked to provide a draft of their paper to the discussant no less than two weeks before the conference.

Attendees whose papers have been selected to be part of paper forums will be informed of this when acceptances go out in early June. The launch of the “paper forum” session type is being done on a trial basis. There will be ten (10) paper forum sessions during the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting in Chicago. Potential discussants will be recruited at the same time that chairs are recruited for all AMS paper panels in late June and July.

For more information about paper forums or any other aspect of the AMS Annual Meeting contact the AMS Office at events@amsmusicology.org.