Closing an extremely exhausting summer, I went to the conference of the Asociación de Historiadores (no female forms in our titles, please!) Latinoamericanistas Europeos at the FU Berlin this week to present initial ideas for my post-doc project. The whole conference programme and its main topics can be found here.

What cannot be found there is the fee for the registration of the conference: 349 euros for non-members, 240-something for members, who have to pay roughly 100 bucks per year for their membership — meaning that you cannot get a bargain any way. This was a point of huge discussions at the conference, as obviously such high fees exclude many (especially younger) researchers from attending. As a non-member I’m not sure how these things finally played out, as I was not allowed to participate in the discussion process, but I hope that the AHILA-board will take action accordingly.

Apart from that, the conference was quite big and it lasted only three days, meaning that many of the panels I wanted to visit were taking place at the same time. In the end, it was good to see some old colleagues again, meet some new ones, and receive some reading hints for my own project. In the future, though, I should really think twice before attending such enormous events, as time and again I realise I don’t really profit from them so much as from smaller ones.

Anyway, that was the last conference so far, now it’s time to really dig into the literature and kick-start my project.