Registration for the 2026 CGC virtual Summer Institute is now open! Cost to members is $25 (members, make sure your membership is up to date before trying to buy a ticket!); non-members, $90. Go to the event calendar page to register (buy a ticket).

Presenters, please make sure to register by May 15th.

Also, we’ve posted the preliminary SI schedule; check it out on the SI 2026 home page!

Finally, in order to maintain our funding and adequately support the organization and graduate communication experts, the CGC is having to raise its membership rates for the first time in several years, from $55 to $60 (and now $35 for part-time, student, or international members). However, we are also now able to offer discounts if you pay for two years ($110) or three years ($165). Go to Join/Renew to take advantage of these offers.

Please email summerinstitute@gradconsortium.org with any questions about the SI. We look forward to seeing you there!

Join us virtually June 15-18, 2026, for an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and consider how we might better sustain, scale, and innovate graduate communication in higher education.

Hosted by Colorado State University in Fort Collins, the 2026 CGC Virtual Summer Institute invites colleagues to gather online and explore research, program design, assessment strategies, and future directions for the field. Over the past decade, CGC Summer Institutes have supported rich cross-institutional conversations—work that remains essential as we build future-ready, resilient, and equitable graduate communication support structures.

The Consortium on Graduate Communication is an international association whose members provide professional development in written, oral, and multimodal communication to students before and during their (post-)graduate academic and professional programs. CGC members work with graduate students in their first and additional languages. 

We offer the questions below as a starting point for proposals, but we also welcome participants to propose their own topics that extend our shared commitments to sustaining effective practices and imagining what’s next for graduate communication.

• Sustaining What Works: What practices, pedagogies, partnerships, or program models have proven especially effective in supporting graduate student communication? How do we maintain and scale successful initiatives in a time of shifting resources, technologies, and student demographics?

• Imagining What’s Next: What future-oriented approaches do we need to consider as graduate communication evolves? How might new theories, modalities, or collaborative structures help us design more resilient and inclusive programs?

• Innovation, Technology, and Change: How do emerging tools (from new learning platforms to generative AI) shape graduate communication? What innovations are enhancing (or challenging) writing, speaking, and multimodal communication pedagogies? What frameworks help us integrate technology in sustainable, ethical, and student-centered ways?

• Building for the Future: How can graduate communication professionals lead institutional change, influence policy, and advocate for long-term program sustainability? What research, assessment strategies, or models of professional leadership point toward effective and future-ready graduate communication support?

The Summer Institute will offer Research Presentations, Workshops, Works-in-Progress, Plenary and Keynote addresses (descriptions and proposal requirements follow), along with opportunities for informal conversation. Participants are welcome to submit proposals for any format except plenaries and keynotes, which are arranged by invitation. 

Author: Eric Grunwald

Eric Grunwald is director of and lecturer in MIT’s English Language Studies (ELS) program. An instructor in ELS since 2012, he draws on a wide breadth of scholastic and vocational experiences to help students across the disciplines improve their academic and professional communication skills. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, studied math, physics, computer science, and astronomy before switching to the humanities and graduating with a degree in history. He began teaching English in Berlin, Germany, during the German Reunification, and then worked for several years in technology transfer at Stanford before obtaining his master’s in creative writing at Boston University. (See ericgrunwald.com.) After serving as managing editor at the literary journal Agni, he returned to teaching in 2007 and now teaches a variety of communication courses for bilingual MIT undergraduates and graduate students. He presents regularly at conferences in the U.S. and abroad and has received Institute grants to design an undergraduate creative writing course just for bilingual students and to design a website—writingprocess.mit.edu—to instruct students in a formal writing process. Grunwald became ELS director in July 2022 and serves on the CMS/W Writing Council. He is a member-at-large on the CGC Board and chairs the CGC Communications Committee.