Proposal Review Process

If you submit a proposal for a presentation or session on the annual meeting program, your proposal will be reviewed according to the following guidelines.

We always receive more proposals than can be accommodated into the space and time available for meeting sessions, and we work to present the strongest possible program of sessions within those limitations. Accordingly, each year we ask the Annual Meeting Committee to exercise its best professional judgment in applying the criteria below to all proposals, and give the Committee the authority to accept and reject all proposals, just as we give the editors of the JAF the authority to accept and reject all Journal submissions.

The Annual Meeting Committee will carry out a blind review of 500-word long abstracts for all annual meeting program proposals, and will accept for the program those proposals that best address the following criteria:

• A clear thesis or analytical statement
• A coherent argument
• An indication of familiarity with previous research
• A statement of the presentation’s or session’s contribution to a deeper understanding of the theme of the year’s meeting, or to one or more of the core concepts of the field of folklore, such as art, context, folk, genre, group, identity, local knowledge, performance, text, or tradition

AFS will e-mail all who submit a proposal with notification of acceptance or rejection for the annual meeting program in June.

We will post a preliminary version of the annual meeting program schedule on the AFS website by early July. Please review this schedule carefully. We must receive all your requests for changes and all corrections to this program by two weeks after its posting. We will try to accommodate the changes you request before that deadline, but we cannot guarantee such accommodation.