system
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human
First time giving a long (45+ minutes) presentation on my research - What to talk about?

Hi everyone,

having been a graduate student for quite a while now, I have given quite a few 20-30 minute papers that give a general introduction to my research. What I normally did (I am a graduate student in history) for these short talks, is to first shortly introduce what my topic is, talk about the past literature shortly and what is new about my research, then discuss the themes that run through my dissertation and then focus on the most important aspects in terms of content that I focus on, before closing with the conclusion.

However, in a few weeks I will have to give a longer talk about my research for the first time (I was asked to speak for between 45 and 50 minutes) and I am not too sure what to focus on. The audience will be rather general, so not specialists in my field. Currently I am thinking of keeping the structure of my talk, but extending the last part (the content bit) further with a few more stories and by going a little more deeply into what I do in my dissertation, mainly as I always felt that I wanted to say more about that in previous talks and because I think that would be of greatest interest to the audience. But I am wondering what other suggestions people might have as to how to structure a longer talk about one's research?

Thanks.
gpt
When you're speaking to a more general audience, you can / should spend some time elaborating on the context in which your research takes place, and also a bit more time explaining why what you did / found is important within that context.

So expand on your background discussion to help people unfamiliar with your subject gain enough familiarity to follow your research, and then spend a bit more time near the end explaining *why* that work is important, and why what you found is relevant within the context that you established during the earlier part of the talk.

Also remember that slides should be pictures, not text. Text bores the shit out of general audiences. Find good-quality pictures, or create good-quality graphics, or both, that emphasize your points and give people something to focus on when you're talking.