Duquesne University Research Symposium

By Al Preston

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Blog: Graduate Symposium Poster Presentation

            This week, I attended Duquesne University’s Graduate Student Research Symposium. You may have noticed a post on our Instagram, and soon we will have our first video added to our YouTube channel. Duquesne University’s symposium is a great way for students to present their work to locals, other professionals, and each other.

            The Holiday Pride only had a poster at the event about our first upcoming exhibit and thus far collected oral histories. The poster included the questions we sought to answer, and some clips of the oral histories already edited on the website. It was also a test run of how we want to present ourselves to other professionals. With the upcoming conference in Washington DC looming in April, I especially wanted to start talking about this work and refining how I wanted to present it.

            I won’t give too much away on the talk we have planned for the DC conference, but I will talk about this event at Duquesne! I’d like to admit something first.

            I’m horrible at design. A wonderful (and absolutely awful) example is my first few attempts to design the poster for this event.

            I know! It’s terrible. Thankfully, a good friend of mine helped me get to the final design.

            …and then the event told us the actual needed size of the poster which gave me so much more room! With a little help from my professor, we landed on this design:

            This version allowed me to add images of Donny’s, a former gay bar in the Polish Hill, as it currently stands. The next two images are archival images from the Heinz History Center. The middle is a flyer from Pittsburgh’s AIDS Task force for a potluck event. And the last one, on the right, is a bulletin from a church service performed during Pittsburgh’s 1990 Pride event.

            I would really like to acknowledge that most of the website and image designs for the Holiday Pride come from me slapping pretty colors together and having someone with a more refined design sense tone it back down.

            Anyway! Presenting one’s work can be a bit scary. As an expert in my work, I worry that I am too much in the thick of it to properly communicate what I’ve done. However, this isn’t my first conference or the first time I have given a quick elevator pitch.

            My poster was to be presented in the afternoon, but some of my fellow public history students were presenting in the morning or giving oral presentations, so I went to support them. For a few of them, this was their first conference.

            When it came to be my turn for the poster presentation, I felt less nervous than I expected. This was, after all, the work I really wanted to be doing. As this was a research symposium for graduate students, my professors did all surround and swamped me at the beginning to ask me a bunch of hard questions about my work. Which, to me, was not all that difficult. I have been doing this research for a long time and have been doing history for much longer. I knew, to an extent, what they were going to ask.

            Most of my professors knew I was doing this work, but they didn’t know the full scale of scope of what I had accomplished up until this point. Once they shuffled along, the harder part began.

            Most of the other graduate students presenting were from the sciences, nursing, or business schools. Minus my fellow history students, there was little representation from the liberal arts school. I would be faced with people who were not historians or queer folks in any way. I knew I was safe, but that would never stop that little nagging fear that someone may be unpleasant.

            Thankfully, no one was. Instead, I got confused and curious stares of people who didn’t know how to approach me. To be so loudly queer and doing history, most of the people attending this conference wouldn’t know how to engage with me or my work.

            The questions I got, however, were curious and intrigued. A few people didn’t know things that I and other historians in the field have taken as fact. It was good practice and a reminder to use inclusive language when presenting to the public. This also gave me some great ideas for future podcast episodes, blog posts, and exhibits. More than one person expressed interest in a walking tour of the locations of the old gay bars. Many were happy to know one was in the works.

            It’s hard, when embedded in the work, to remember that there are people outside of it who do not know as much as I do, if anything at all. These people also want to learn and understand a community and history that they are not familiar with. When throwing oneself and work into the internet void, feedback or engagement feel non-existent. The part of my work I enjoy the most is engaging with people and bringing them history and knowledge.

            Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I felt like I was satisfied with my work or felt like it was—real. There’s a significant barrier when posting on the internet. I often feel like I am simply saving my work to a fancy hard drive, but talking with people, watching them explore the website in front of me, helped me get inspired all over again.

            We have that other conference up coming in DC. I hope that experience will be just as powerful.