Student and Graduate Experiences of an International Conference
Leeds International Medieval Congress 2023
Introduction by Dr Lucy Dean, with reports by Lucy Elmendorf and Sofya Nikiforova
Leeds International Medieval Congress, or Leeds IMC as it more commonly known to its regular attendees and participants, welcomes over 2,500 medieval scholars from around the world to Leeds every summer. Established in 1994, this is a richly interdisciplinary event that offers traditional conference panels, roundtables, plenary speakers, exhibitions, excursions, book stalls, craft fairs, workshops and entertainment for those who attend and for the wider public.
The event – hosted annually by the Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds – also offers important opportunities for networking and scholarly collaboration. Importantly, this includes introducing early career scholars to the richness of medieval scholarship in all its fascinating shapes and sizes. I attended my first Leeds IMC as a rather nervous doctoral candidate in 2011 and – despite being overwhelmed by the bulging programme – it did not take me long to realise that there were few other places that I could engage with such varied range of approaches and subjects relating to all things medieval.
In 2023, I had the great pleasure of sharing the experience with two of our recent graduates from the Centre for History, UHI: Lucy Elmendorf, a recent honours graduate who is now at the University of York undertaking a Masters programme in Medieval History, and Sofya Nikiforova, a graduate of our MLitt programme, who has recently embarked on a PhD programme at the University of Lincoln, who presented her first paper at the conference this year.
They were both keen to share their experience of this event through a conference review, and we hope that in sharing their experiences of this conference we will encourage others to embrace such opportunities – at whatever stage of their academic career, or just for the pure delight and interest that the conference can provide. Without further ado, therefore, I hand over to our graduates.
