Conference Session Question

I was pleased to see this session in the conference program, organized around a topic to which I’ve dedicated much of my professional life, and I think you presenters have done a wonderful job to an extent. I think we all know what a labor of love organizing a conference session can be, especially when it is on a topic that is fairly complicated – a topic, perhaps, that only a handful of scholars have truly engaged and perhaps upon which only one or two have done any truly definitive work. The panel organizers might have thought to invite a central figure in this field to anchor the session, someone who has covered much of this ground already and is acknowledged to have done the first and still the best work on this question, but I’m told the organizers wanted fresh (as opposed to what, I don’t know!) voices and they invited some, well, emerging scholars to contribute. I think we’d all agree they did a fine job after a fashion; we hardly missed the usual contributors that often present papers on this topic.

But to return to my question – I promise there’s a question in here! – as I sat, rapt, listening to these fine presentations, I started wondering if the panelists were perhaps giving short shrift to some of the definitive findings on this topic that have proved quite sound and durable for almost two decades; I’m sure everyone in the room can tick off the titles of the groundbreaking publications that helped define this field – and, with all due respect, I began to suspect that some of the presenters were taking a rather … cavalier … direction, given the enduring centrality of those seminal works of scholarship with which all of us are familiar. So as I listened I began to formulate a response — we can’t all help but notice that a panel this good often cries out for a respondent, a prominent scholar to draw all the presentations together under the existing — and still quite valid — paradigm.

Thus my query, which should be prefaced with a reminder that in our discipline conference panels like this one ought to be informed by a thorough understanding of, if not respect for, the earlier work that created the very conditions that allow for the continued study of this issue. I hesitate to say "standing on the shoulders of giants," but I would hazard that some of the panel participants have failed to accommodate, much less cite – yes, I said cite – the key sources, which are as relevant today as they were when first published. At the risk of detracting from all this freshness, I can’t help put note that the papers I heard today can do no more than elaborate upon disciplinary principles already well established — footnotes to Plato and all that. And yet, certain experts went unmentioned. Certain still-relevant and available authorities could have spoken today, had one been invited to this session. My question, at last:

Don't you know who I am?