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