Jules,

The American Studies Association (ASA) establishes a theme for its
conferences (2007's is "America Aqui: Transhemispheric Visions and
Community Connections"), and some roundtables and panels related to
it or important issues in the field, but most sessions are organized by the
participants themselves. Instead of submitting a paper proposal, one
person (or more) takes responsibility for organizing a panel, a
roundtable or presentations in another format. They either do that with a
panel of presenters already in mind or recruit them for the panel they
want to organize. While that process is underway, the American Studies
email list (H-Amstdy) is full of CFPs from people organizing panels.
Once the presenters are recruited, the person organizing the panel
writes up a proposal for the panel as a whole. I haven't looked at the
requirements for this year's conference, but they usually include an
overall summary (usually with a statement of how the panel addresses
the conference theme), brief abstracts of the papers and CVs of the
presenters and chair. The panel proposals are then reviewed by the
conference organizers and accepted or rejected as a whole.

In general, I think this is a good way to organize a conference because
the process of organizing the panels gets people thinking about how
their papers relate to those of the other presenters, and the panels can
be better integrated as a result. Of course, that doesn't always happen
but I've been to some very good panels at ASA conferences. In the past,
the ASA has also accepted proposals from people wanting to present
individual papers but I would recommend organizing or trying to become
part of a panel instead.

You might want to browse through the logs of the email list
(http://www.h-net.org/~amstdy/) or through past issues of the ASA
newsletter if they are still available online to see how people have
presented CFPs for panels in the past. Many of them present
summaries of what they are trying to get across and list the topics of the
papers people have already agreed to present within the panel.

You might think of the ASA conference as allowing you to decide what
you want to write about instead of handing you a writing assignment
based on what they think should be presented.

Jim Zwick