Preparing my Presentation for the AAGG Conference

I have been quite busy preparing my presentation for This Saturday’s AAGG Conference in Philadelphia on April 27. If you missed it, the announcement is on the AAGG website.

Although I write for a living, I was amazed at the difficulty in preparing a 50-minute talk on my research.  To make matters worse, the conference organizer, Carlean Mullen, asked me to start with the whole Caribbean and then my focus area, the Virgin Islands.  While I’m not what I would call an expert on the whole Caribbean, it was quite a task to squeeze it all in.

Add to that the challenge that few people in attendance will likely have any real understanding of the Virgin Islands beyond the fact that it’s a nice vacation destination.  Hundreds of years of history, social commentary, and my research methods and case studies smashed into a mere 50 minutes (oh, and the whole Caribbean too). To top it off, I never really learned PowerPoint.

After a good week of hard work (and learning PowerPoint), I think I have something that will be interesting for the novice and veteran alike.  During my research for the presentation I made some interesting discoveries about West Indian history that I will write about afterwards.

So, keep your fingers crossed for me so that I can represent our islands well.  I’ll be sure to post a report of how the day went.