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In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
Suppose you've got a brand new book coming out, or a spicy new article, and you'd like to do some colloquium talks. How do you get into that circuit?
Excellent question! Do any readers have any helpful tips or other insights?
If it’s possible, then it’s easy: you email your friends and ask them to invite you. If the latter isn’t possible, then getting on the circuit is probably quite simply impossible.
There’s really nothing more to it than that. I think people overestimate the prestige associated with colloquium talks because they underestimate how many of them are implicit self-invites.
We look at cv’s and say “oh wow you gave a talk at FancyPantsU!” Yes. How impressive: I emailed my friend at FancyPantsU and said “it’s been a while since we’ve been drunk together; let’s make that happen again.” Boom. Colloquium invite.
Is this the majority of colloquium invites? I’m not sure. Probably. It’s certainly a very very hefty minority if not.
“But Timmy! If that’s how things are, won’t it disproportionately benefit people who are already fancy?” Yes. Yes of course it will. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. Everything in our field that is not explicitly set up to work against prestige bias is set up to reinforce it. Every. Damn. Thing.
You get invited to give colloquia.
I guess some people try to promote themselves by cold calling or tweeting abouthowthey have travel funding or money or are going to be in this place at this time, but, call me old fashioned, I think both things are really distasteful and I think the former thing is actually probably mildly morally wrong, it puts people in a position where they have to either do a special favor for someone not necessarily because they are interested in their work or because it is who they would pick in a less corrupt process, but because they are bad at saying no or aren’t thinking straight (and… I’ll just say that I have a relatively reasonable sample size of people asking me/my colleagues/my friends to give talks and I think there is one woman ever that I can think of doing that to any of us, and many, many, almost entirely white, men, so it might also exacerbate structural issues about who is getting asked/invited to give talks if certain people are inviting themselves).
I think the answer is let your work speak for itself, and feel free to tell people about the work itself–like it’s okay to post on social media about new papers or books, it’s even okay (I find it a bit cringey but it doesn’t create the same forced sense of obligation as the above) to email people and be like hey here’s a pdf of my book I just published in case you are interested–and hope for invitations. But I really don’t think one can do anything direct–or rather I don’t think anyone should do anything direct–to try to get people to invite you to give colloquium talks.
At one place I’ve worked, there’s one faculty member in charge of arranging all the talks. At another place I’ve worked, there were different research clusters with different faculty members arranging the talks.
Anyways, emailing these people and asking to be invited is a way of getting to do a talk. If you don’t know who they are, email the admin contact person and ask.
(In part it depends on how many talks the places you’re thinking of put on, but if it seems like they put on a lot, then volunteers are likelier to be successful. If they do just a few per year and make a big deal of it when they do, less likely.)
Arguably more than any other part of our profession, participation in the colloquium talk circuit is driven by prestige, social, and “rising star” network dynamics. I’m highly skeptical that any actionable advice will be forthcoming in this thread…
It depends on where you want to give colloquia. I’ve done two grants in Brazil, where there was a longstanding shortage of funds for departments to bring in outside speakers. As part of my grants, I got travel money, and so I would cold-email departments I wanted to visit and ask if they would be interested in a talk. I think in all my attempts (~10), only one department failed to reply and all the others welcomed me. I gave talks at the majority (where I benefitted quite a bit from the interactions), and they seemed happy to have a ‘free’ outside speaker during a recession. I imagine the same dynamics would apply to a lot of departments in other places, especially those with limited resources for colloquia. So, if you only want to give colloquia at Harvard, etc., then maybe it’d be silly to ask, but there are opportunities for good philosophical exchanges outside of the elite departments.
How about we ask people who organize colloquia: How do you find/select your speakers?
@ Timmy J, maybe this is some of how things work but…
–I work at a PhD granting but (very) not prestigious department, and I’ve given about 15 colloquium talks and I’ve never even implicitly invited myself (and about 2/3 of the talk invitations have been at places where I at best have met someone on the faculty in passing but am certainly not remotely friendly with any of them). I’m also not a super fancy person (none of my talks, for example, have been at Leiter top ten institutions, and many of them have been at programs with just an MA program, or occasionally slacs with only undergrads).
–I have fairly in depth knowledge of how we invite people to give talks in our department, and while there is obviously always some influence from who people know etc., I can’t think of a single case in which someone just invited one of their friends–there’s a whole process, a committee, etc.–people can suggest their friends, but even that isn’t usually what happens; people tend to try to suggest people that they think the whole department, or at least a large part of it, will be interested in, or people who they have seen give really good talks but aren’t super personally connected to, etc.
This is just a sample of one of each type of thing here (the speaker and the department) but I highly doubt my department is unique here, or that my experience being invited to give talks is unique. So I think you are at least overblowing how much this is about just hobnobbing with our friends.
Not what you asked, but… if you’re trying to advertise/“drive engagement” for a book or article, why not find the relevant YouTubers? Different audience I guess, but a bigger audience, and probably easier to cold-call/self-invite
I work in the UK and have organised both departmental colloquia and research-centre specific colloquia. In my experience, the former tend to be a little more prestigious.
In general, the way we do it is as follows: we have a nominating process and a voting process, with the final decision being one made by the colloquium organizer (and anyone else who wants to help) that aims (as best as possible) at a representation of a range of areas so that everyone in the department has at least one or two colloquia reflecting their research interests (broadly speaking). We also aim for some diversity in career stage and Universities to guard against prestige bias (e.g., not too many professors, not a majority Oxbridge line-up). The process is therefore largely democratic, and since everyone has a say in how it goes, everyone is expected to rock up each week and support the research environment.
I think the norms for friend-of-a-colleague-speakers differ depending on the kind of talk it is and what the friend is asking for:
For the departmental level seminar: If a colleague’s friend asks them to give a talk at our University, we usually prefer that this be a special one-off event/extra colloquium, organised independently from our official ones. Anyone is welcome to go, but no one is expected to attend in the way that they’d be expected to attend the democratically organised one. And it needs to be self-funded; most of us prefer not to put our limited collective budget towards these friend-of-a-colleague events.
For the research-centre seminar: this is a smaller, more intimate group with a lot of over-lapping research interests, so there’s more scope for bringing a friend of a colleague onto the schedule. (In practice, we often won’t have the funding to cover their travel or accommodation, but often do have enough to and are happy to shout them a dinner). We usually like these opportunities, since we view it as a ‘free speaker’ that we’re all getting who at least works in our general area, even if not within our research specialty.
I can’t speak for other UK departments, of course. Maybe others would find it ‘distasteful’ to ask a friend to invite you for a talk. But as long as you’re not expecting the friend’s department to cover your expenses, I don’t think it’s gauche to ask—though it is part of a wider practice of nepotism and prestige bias that I think we should all be worried about! But there are other steps we can take to reduce that (e.g., being more mindful about whom we select as invited speakers) without going to the extreme of shaming anyone who hosts a friend and says we’re all welcome to join the bonus colloquium that they’ve put together.
I’ve given quite a few colloquium talks in the UK over several years, and I can report that in none of these cases have I ever asked to be invited there. From what I hear from my colleagues, their experiences are largely the same. So I’m sceptical about the idea that a large portion of colloquium talks are just friends helping out friends. But maybe it’s different elsewhere.
Finally: I personally really appreciate it when someone puts on their social media that they’re going to be in X part of the world during X time! For places with tighter budgets, it often means that we get to host people whom we couldn’t otherwise afford to host.
I’m a bit surprised by some of the previous comments. For what it’s worth, in my experience as a grad student at a Leiter top 15 our colloquia are decided by a committee of faculty and grad students. Currently I’m serving on our committee and we do a combination of thinking up names of junior and senior speakers we’d like to hear give talks and putting a vote to the department. I don’t think we’re particularly consistent as a department about how we decide colloquia. It’s possible that self-invites have been a thing, but I doubt it. I certainly wouldn’t ever send such an email if I were hoping to get an invite someday in the future. In general the people we tend to invite are either bigger names or up-and-coming junior scholars. My guess is that getting an invite is mostly a matter of gaining some name recognition among both the faculty and graduate students at the inviting institution. If your work really is that interesting, then it’s possible you’re already on some lists or may be soon! After that it’s probably a matter of luck. Things are different for seminars or other events.
I suspect there are some different departmental norms regarding what a “colloquium” is and how serious it is.
I’m at a department where colloquiums are frequent and less of a big deal. It’s common for someone to be the speaker merely because they expressed interest in being the speaker. There’s one person running everything. No committees, no votes.
This is not a direct answer to the question, but to echo what GU said, here in India we are very happy if someone who will be in the area cold emails us and says “hey, I’ll be around from date X to date Y, any chance I could give a talk?”
Maybe things are different in the US (perhaps especially if you’re in a city people are happy to visit any time merely to give a talk) but I wouldn’t have thought it would be weird to email someone to say “I’m going to be in the area, any chance the university would be interested in me giving a talk?”
I understand this might put pressure on people who feel bad about saying “no,” and that white men might be more willing to cold email like this than other people. But these seem like problems to fix not by outlawing the practice of emailing departments when you’re available to give a talk but by other things. There could for instance be a general acceptance that saying “no” to those requests is okay. I organized colloquia for a few years and I would not have felt bad turning down people for whom we had no good time slots.
In our centre, each of us invites one person a semester. We tend to pick people we want to hear from given our personal research interests. I have asked some academic giants, but also some earlier people. I have had a co-author, and a former student from elsewhere. I did have a colleague from afar ask for an invitation. In this case, I knew her work well, and I thought it would be of interest to our graduates students. Norms around this are hardly fixed and they are, to some extent, culturally varied. When I organzie conferences or workshops I tend to aim for a mixed group – this is both intellectually stimulating and profitable, but also often demanded by the agencies that fund these sorts of things.
Wow, what a stigma against “self-invitation”! I would say to OP that you can cold email people at places where you want to give a talk who are either aware of your work and like it or aren’t aware but very likely to like it. Giving a colloquium talk is a nice privilege but it’s not a hall of fame that some people here might be making it sound like! Sometimes your work is just not under the radar, and people would appreciate your willingness to share. But I agree that you can’t ask in a super direct way, and certainly can’t sound like forcing yourself on them.
P.S. I have tried to get myself into some invitation in the past, and it has worked really well for me.
Well, the stigma (which I think is real in at least some quarters, e.g. one of my colleagues recently complained to me about someone who did this maybe five years ago and how much it annoyed her) is probably worth taking seriously even if you disagree that it should exist, since it means people will in fact judge self-inviters negatively. (But I guess if you have success self-inviting, you can weigh that against the positive outcome.) I wouldn’t do it!
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