Usually the Call for papers indicates how long should papers be. In the Humanities you usually get a 20-minute slot, plus 5 or 10 minutes for questions. As for writing style, presentation tips etc. - I have attended a number of seminars/short courses organized by my university or by other organizations within my discipline which give advice about all this, of course you get to hear lots of different opinions as to whether it's better to read your paper or to say it, whether you should use PowerPoint or not... but everything helps. Plus of course observing other speakers "live". Why not present anything first at a seminar or small conference at your department? It's usually less intimidating, plus you sometimes do get useful feedback to modify your paper before presenting it at a major conference.

It might be because your external examiner might sometimes be one of your references... and then of course the more prestige he has the better.

I'm doing a historical topic too (albeit in music) and from the beginning my supervisor encouraged me to devise a "thematic" structure rather than a chronological one. So I selected 5 topics and assigned a chapter to each topic, which I think is also meaningful from the publications point of view, as someone has already mentioned. Then inside each chapter there's of course some hints to the chronology to reflect the changes in perspectives and ideas. I also plan to develop a more traditional, chronological narrative in my introduction, but only to present the general framework in which I'm working.
The recent histories of music anyway tend to shift away from the chronological paradigm and they are usually organized by genres or by topics or by "ideas", I don't know if this is the case in your field.

I would say as soon as you have something relevant to say in your field. That said, my department expects at least 1 conference paper from each PhD student from their second year onwards.

On Friday I'm going to Italy for 4 days, then 1 day back to the department, then 2,5 weeks home (but with loads of essays to mark

My supervisor asks me periodically to send him a plan of what I want to do in the following months (e.g. chapter writing, sources, etc.), and I always include the estimate dates in which I plan to send him written work and possible dates for a supervision session to comment on this work (for example, I may include the submission of a chapter at the beginning of April and a supervision session end-April). I think that this can be useful for your supervisor to realize that you cannot really progress if you don't receive timely feedback.

In my first year I devoted about 40 hours a week to my PhD, sometimes working 9 to 5 and sometimes distributing the 40 hours along the 7 days of the week. Now (2nd year) I typically do PhD work 30 hours per week, as I don't think 40 hours are really necessary for me (plus I get 10 extra hours which I devote to my teaching certificate, teaching preparation, the actual teaching etc).

I would say send your supervisor the best work you can produce AT THIS STAGE. Of course he won't expect it to be perfect. I've sent my supervisor chapters with sections which were weak because I hadn't looked at all the primary sources yet but I think this is fine as long as you explain your reasons (and indeed you may receive useful comments from him which may help you when you do your primary research or experiments).

Hi krokodile,

I'm so sorry to hear of your loss, hopefully things are starting to get better by now...

The best thing is asking your supervisor, director of graduate studies or head of department about teaching opportunities. I know of PhD students who are teaching at Masters level so the fact that your location is postgraduate only is not necessarily a problem. You could also try other universities in your area although in this case I don´t know if it´s better to send a speculative mail or to wait until they specifically open a position. I've also heard of PhD students teaching/tutoring at distance learning or PT institutions such as the Open University.

I started reading in every of my foreign languages at a rather early stage of learning. At the beginning I had to look up half of the words or so, but I quickly started to learn vocabulary and to get familiar with the particularities of the language. It helps if you read things which are not too complex from the point of view of its content, such as light newspaper articles, etc.

It also helps watching films in the foreign language with subtitles (in English or Swedish), although I don't know if there are plenty of Swedish films available.

In my case, I did (and continue doing) both because they are things which I enjoy doing, so if I plan to watch a DVD one evening why not give it a try and watch it in a foreign language.

I would love to learn another foreign language (preferably Hindi or Chinese) but I'm afraid I'll have to wait until I finish my PhD...

In my department you can allegedly change your supervisor if your relation with him/her is an obstacle to the progress of your PhD, but in fact I've never known anyone who has changed supervisor (except in cases of supervisor retiring/getting a new job etc.). I also support the idea of speaking to your head of department/director of graduate studies about it. Good luck.

I sometimes say to myself that a PhD doesn't need to be exceptional - it only has to be enough to get yourself the degree, it's not like in an undergraduate or a masters where you get first class, distinction, etc. But then, for my personal satisfaction, I'd really like to produce a very good piece of research.

My family (though well-intentioned) are not really helpful: I have always had good grades without apparently much effort, sometimes even working FT at the same time or studying for 2 different degrees, and they say: "Oh, we're sure you'll cope with this as you've always done" (as if a PhD were like A-levels). Moreover, being on a fees-only studentship, I've taken 2 casual jobs to support myself (and have recently found out that I don't really need to work that many hours to support my lifestyle... though money is always welcome, of course).

I can only relate to your situation. When I started my PhD last year, I didn't really have high expectations - I moved to the UK from abroad and my research project was not very precisely defined, so I decided I would just do an "okay 1st year" and not a good or a very good one. However I soon started to find really interesting material from my primary sources, I submitted several abstract proposals to conferences and nearly all got accepted, same thing with academic journals. My supervisors have rated my progress as very good for a first year, but now I can see they have high expectations on me (which they didn't necessarily have a year ago). Trouble is, I now have high expectations myself...