Thank you for your help in putting together the Program for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Please note a few guidelines as you prepare for your presentation. 

For further information, please see our Information for Speakers page and the Annual Meeting Guidelines.

I. Time Limits

1. Most sessions last for two hours. Sessions on Friday morning last for 90 minutes. Chairs should be sure to leave at least 30 minutes for discussion. It is important that verbose participants do not cut into the time of other participants or into the time reserved for floor discussion.
2. The chair should be concise in introducing the speakers in the session.
3. Presenters and commentators should make sure that their presentations can be done in the time allotted. Presenters should practice and time their presentations in advance. The chair should be very firm about timekeeping.
4. It is important that all sessions end on time. Chairs should not allow the discussion to continue beyond the announced time limit.

II. Deadlines

All presenters must get copies of their papers or presentations to commentators and their chair by December 1. A month’s leeway is needed to give commentators sufficient time to do their jobs well, and thus this is a crucial deadline. If an author fails to meet the deadline, the chair should immediately contact him or her to make sure that the paper is supplied at the earliest possible date. Furthermore, if a presentation comes in that obviously exceeds the time allotted to it, the chair should write the author at once and insist that a shorter version be prepared.

For poster sessions, general information can be found here.

III. Equipment

Session organizers were required to indicate if audiovisual equipment would be needed when submitting the session. AHA staff will contact organizers in the fall to confirm AV orders. At the meeting, if anything is missing or defective, please report it immediately to the AHA Headquarters Office.

As indicated by the Annual Meeting Guidelines, AV equipment cannot be ordered through the AHA after June 1. Presenters may order equipment directly from the hotel at their own expense.

IV. Last-Minute Changes at the Meeting

If a participant is unexpectedly obliged to withdraw from the session for any reason, the chair should handle the problem or enlist the Program Committee chair’s or co-chair’s aid. Changes sent to aha@historians.org will be printed on an errata sheet distributed at the meeting and reflected in the online program and the meeting app. In addition, an announcement of the change should be made at the beginning of the session.