Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS)
CESS Annual Conference
Guidelines for Writing CESS Conference Paper Abstracts
The paper abstracts will be published at the time of the conference and therefore
must be of publishable quality and must represent your paper well. They
are also the primary basis upon which the program committee selects papers for
inclusion in the program, and if you do not write a good abstract, the chances
of your inclusion in the program are small, since we receive many more proposals
than it is possible to accommodate in the program.
For those who may be less familiar with conference paper abstracts, we offer
the following as a guide.
An abstract is a very brief summary of your paper. An abstract is
not a description of the paper or an introduction to the paper.
Your abstract should be 200 to 300 words (abstracts longer than 300 words may
be rejected by the selection committee with no futher consideration) and should
include the following information:
- The topic of your paper.
- Your research method and/or sources.
- Your specific argument and/or central findings so that anyone who
reads the abstract will know what the results of your research are.
- The relevance of your argument or findings to a larger body of scholarly
literature.
Below is an example of a very good abstract from the 2001 CESS Annual Conference
(submitted by Steven Duke; word count: 173 -- note that, at that time, the maximum
word limit was 200):
This paper focuses on the development of schools for Tatars, Mordvinians,
Ukrainians, and Germans in Saratov Province (Guberniia) from 1865 to 1895.
These schools included two and three-class schools run by the Ministry
of Education, confessional schools (Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran),
and locally supported public schools. I argue that this section of the
Middle Volga region experienced a significant expansion in the number of schools
available and the number of pupils attending those schools in the last few
decades of the nineteenth century, although significant challenges remained
to the expansion of literacy and educational opportunities for the non-Russian
population. In contrast to standard interpretations, I argue that many
communities were successful in exercising local initiative in their educational
affairs; as a result, they experienced much more local autonomy than the Ministry
of Education preferred. This paper is based on published materials,
including a four-volume study by the Saratov Provincial Academic Archeographical
Commission, and on archival materials from the Saratov State Historical Archive.
You may find it useful to refer to abstacts of other CESS conference papers,
as well. For this, we refer you to the Abstracts
of 2005 CESS Annual Conference, though note that some are better models
than others.
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