Call for Panels
An opening Call for Panels was made in August 2025, inviting colleagues to submit proposals to the conference organizers by 31 October 2025.
Please send on your:
- panel title,
- an abstract/synopsis of the topic,
- and the names and affiliation of panel organisers (with a brief scholarly biography).
- Do also include details of any proposed speakers you may have in place already.
All to be submitted to classics@mu.ie
Each panel must be proposed by at least two organizers. They are responsible for submitting the panel topic for evaluation by the Organizing Committee and, after approval, for developing and disseminating any subsequent Call for Papers for their panel.
The Call for Papers of the panels will be also available on the Conference website. Panel organizers are invited to use the template for paper proposals that will be provided by the CCC organizers. The final programme of each panel must be submitted to the Organizing Committee by 13 March 2025. We recommend 10 as minimum number and 15 as maximum number of speakers per panel.
Considering that each slot of the conference has a duration of 50 min., and that a minimum of 10 min. of this time has to be kept for discussion of the presentations, two types of paper per slot are accepted: one of 40 min. or two of 20 min.
Accepted languages: it is up to the panel organizers, in recruiting their panel members, to indicate their range of language(s) for academic discourse. All panels should in principle consider submissions in and . Papers in other languages (e.g. Portuguese, German, Spanish) may be accepted at the panel organizers’ discretion.
The organization of the event will use English as its official language, for the sake of wide international accessibility.
Call for Papers (of accepted panel proposals
Calls for individual papers will be issued after the 31 October, once the final list of panels for 2026 is in place.
Any further questions or queries can be directed to your hosts at classics@mu.ie
Between 21 November 2025 and 20 February 2026, the Call for Papers of the panels will be available on the Conference website. Please use the proposal template that will be made available.
Once the acceptance of panel proposals has been communicated, organizers have until 13 March 2025 to collate papers and send on the final programme of their panel.
NOTE: All members of each panel (organizers and speakers) are required to pay the Registration Fee. This applies also in those exceptional (emergency) cases in which a speaker proves unable to attend the conference in person.
Advice on Recruiting a Panel
In our experience a very effective model in general is the panel with two organizers, a younger one (whose original idea the panel may well be) and a senior one. Each will contribute to recruiting the balance of youth and experience that a panel usually needs in its speakers. Even the most experienced scholars and organizers do well, at the earliest stages of recruitment, to seek advice from trusted (and especially overseas) colleagues in their field, about who – in the world – should be invited.
The title of a panel should perhaps err on the side of precision. Potential speakers may be put off by the appearance of over-generality in the subject matter. There is, on the other hand, an art in identifying precise themes – and especially methods – which are shared by apparently disparate fields.
The wording of initial invitations to speakers is a delicate matter. Here the input, and influence, of a senior colleague may be especially valuable. Where a particularly promising colleague accepts, organizers may wish immediately to offer them a special input, as in recommending an additional speaker or in chairing a session.
Where organizers are thinking of eventually making a collective volume based on their panel, the number and length of the initial, oral contributions is especially important. A panel of 25 excellent colleagues poses a problem. Papers will tend, at least initially, to be too short to be properly developed or assessed. And publishers commonly refuse huge multi-author volumes. Appraising and addressing the characteristics of 25 different authors is a burden for any editor, and huge books are usually uneconomic – or inaccessible because of their price. From experience, the CCC recommends papers of 35-40 minutes, which means a maximum of some 15 speakers per panel. On the other hand, panels designed more as workshops than as a step towards a collective volume may have fewer problems with multiple short papers.
Once invitations to potential speakers have gone out, almost everyone who does eventually participate says 'Yes' firmly and within a few days of receiving their invitation. Equivocation rarely turns out well, and long silence is the worst of omens. Invitees who pose special conditions, such as 'I would only be able to speak on the Thursday', very often generate other difficulties later and quite often end by cancelling entirely.
In the months between a speaker’s acceptance and the event, organizers should send to each a circular message or two, not just to give news but also to reassure and check that all is well.
