Conference

The format of NEWEPS meetings:

• There are two NEWEPS meetings per academic year.
• A NEWEPS session will typically comprise 4 papers. Each paper will be workshopped as part of an hour-long discussion. There will be no presentation of the paper. After brief introductory remarks by the “presenter,” an assigned discussant will give comments for 5-10 minutes and the remaining time will be devoted to comments from meeting participants.
• There is a strong norm that all NEWEPS meeting attendees read all papers in advance and come prepared to provide feedback to each paper.
• Each paper discussion within a meeting will be moderated by a faculty co-organizer, who will keep a list of commenters. The moderator will ensure that the first comments after the discussant are from graduate students.
• Where demand is high and logistics permit, there will be two parallel sessions each containing 4 papers. In this case, faculty and students will be randomly assigned across sessions to ensure that sessions are equally sized in terms of faculty and students. Students can trade slots across sessions, but should alert the meeting organizers to maintain balance across sessions.

Selection of papers:

• NEWEPS welcomes all submissions fitting within the group’s themes, and especially those from authors located in the North East. We hope to hold meetings where a diverse range of perspectives can be heard, and thus strongly encourage submissions from authors identifying with under-represented groups.
• While the meetings are designed primarily for academics at NEWEP’s core institutions in the North East, up to 1 exceptional paper per session may be included from beyond the local NEWEPS community.
• Submission from individuals that have presented at one of the last 3 NEWEPS meetings will only be considered if there are not enough qualified papers to fill out the schedule by those who have not presented recently.
• The student coordinator for each meeting will anonymize the authors of all submissions, so an impartial score based on quality and scope for improvement of the paper can be determined by co-organizer reviewers. The coordinator will divide the submissions into separate pools of (i) local, (ii) non-local, and (iii) recently-presented authors.
• Co-organizer reviewers will assign scores to papers privately (e.g. by Google form) to help minimize biases. Faculty co-conveners will be randomly assigned to submit scores on the anonymized papers for either the Fall or the Spring edition of NEWEPS (subject to availability constraints). The host institution’s co-organizer and any student coordinators will always score submissions for the meeting that they host.
• The final selection of local papers will be based on demographic and institutional diversity considerations and a numerical score based on a formula reflecting:
  1. The average score across the anonymous reviews (60%);
  2. Whether the paper submitted is likely to be a job market paper (20%);
  3. Number of previous NEWEPS conferences attended (20%).
• Non-local papers will instead be drawn from a separate pool that considers only demographic diversity considerations and the paper’s anonymous review score.

Meeting attendance:

• Every possible effort will be made to ensure that everyone who wishes to attend a meeting will be able to do so.
• Where demand exceeds a host institution’s capacity constraints, preference will be given to students in their 3rd year or above and to more equal representation across core institutions (with the exception of priority for the host institution funding the meeting).
• Travel expenses for presenters and discussants coming from the North East are typically covered in full by the host institution. All other attendees are expected to cover their own travel expenses.

 

Click on the conference tab above to access conference pages.