The MLA Condemns Cuts at West Virginia University

The MLA’s recent advocacy in support of language and other humanities programs at West Virginia University has received coverage from Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Yahoo News, among numerous other outlets. In a letter to West Virginia University president Gordon Gee featured in the Washington Post, the MLA’s executive director Paula M. Krebs condemned the university’s proposed elimination of the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, writing that “A full liberal arts education includes providing students with the tools that enable them to interact both with their neighbors in West Virginia and with the rest of the world. Science, technology, and business courses and majors are not enough for WVU to offer if it wants to produce fully informed and thinking citizens for West Virginia.” 

To learn more about the cuts to humanities programs at West Virginia University and the MLA’s advocacy initiatives, you can listen to Krebs on Here & Now and read her interview in Axios.

MLA Executive Director Speaks Out against Dramatic Cuts to Humanities Programs at West Virginia University

In a letter sent to Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University, on 11 August, the MLA’s executive director, Paula M. Krebs, responded to the recently proposed cuts at West Virginia University, including the elimination of the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. Krebs noted that the kinds of cuts to the humanities proposed by West Virginia University were unprecedented for a state flagship university and would “dramatically narrow educational opportunities” for all students, not just those in the humanities. 

“All students’ job prospects and lives are enriched by language study, writing instruction, and the research and analytical skills taught in beginning and advanced literature and culture courses,” wrote Krebs. “Access to these courses is especially important in public higher education, which is often the only route to a degree for many state residents.” Beyond providing vital skills, the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and the Department of English generate substantial tuition revenue for the university beyond their expenses, which undermines arguments that cite budgetary issues as a reason for the cuts.

The university’s appeals process runs through mid-September, when the board of governors will vote on the proposed cuts. 

Read the full letter to President Gee.

New Report on the MLA Job List

A report on the jobs advertised in the MLA Job List for the 2020–21 and 2021–22 academic years is now available on the MLA website. The decline in the number of jobs advertised in 2020–21 was pronounced, while 2021–22 showed a welcome rebound to prepandemic levels. Together the significant decline and robust recovery shed light on hiring practices during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020–21, the number of English positions dropped to 510 from 728 in 2019–20, a decline of 29.9%, the steepest recorded in the history of the Job List since 1975. The number of positions in languages dropped to 496 in 2020–21 from 683 in 2019–20, a 27.4% decline, the steepest since the 27.0% decline in 2008–09, during the economic downturn.

In 2021–22, the number of positions witnessed a major recovery. There were 921 positions in English and 837 positions in languages. These increases—80.6% and 68.8%, respectively—are unprecedented, and the number of positions surpassed numbers in the period immediately before the pandemic. The 2021–22 numbers of positions are the highest since 2015–16. Read the full report for more information, including figures charting trends in the data since 1975–76 and breakdowns by tenure status, rank, and field.

Results of the 2023 Ratification Vote

Voting on the 2023 ratification ballot concluded at 11:59 p.m. (EDT) on 5 May. Members ratified the election of Ōe Kenzaburō, Oh Jung-hee, and Xiao Kaiyu to honorary fellowship in the association. Support for the candidates ranged from 96% to 98% of the members who voted in that section of the ballot. Oh Jung-hee and Xiao Kaiyu will be invited to accept the honor. Ōe Kenzaburō passed away after the Delegate Assembly elected him to honorary fellowship in the association; his estate will be invited to accept the honor.

Members also ratified the 2023 Delegate Assembly’s approval of seven constitutional amendments.

Amendment 1 allows for virtual meetings of the Delegate Assembly and hearings conducted by the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee only in years when the convention is fully online.

Amendment 2 updates the language in Articles XI.A and XI.B to allow for electronic voting for new members of the Nominating Committee and Elections Committee.

Amendment 3 authorizes the Executive Council to meet online.

Amendment 4 authorizes other association committees to meet online.

Amendment 5 makes changes to the requirements for field representation on the Executive Council.

Amendment 6 makes changes to the requirements for field representation on the Nominating Committee.

Amendment 7 makes changes to the requirements for the representation of membership categories on the Nominating Committee.

Support for the amendments ranged from 90% to 99% of the members who voted in that section of the ballot. The amendments, which take immediate effect, have been incorporated into the text of the constitution at the MLA website.

MLA Members Receive 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships

Congratulations to the eight MLA members among the winners of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships announced in April 2023. Many fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, democracy and policing, scientific innovation, climate change, and identity. Noting the impact of these annual grants, Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, said, “The new class of fellows has followed their calling to enhance all of our lives, to provide greater human knowledge and deeper understanding. We’re lucky to look to them to bring us into the future.”

Fellowships

Michael Berry, University of California, Los Angeles

Field of study: Translation

Stefani Engelstein, Duke University

Field of study: European and Latin American Literature

Gretchen H. Gerzina, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Field of study: Intellectual and Cultural History

Petra Kuppers, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Field of study: Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

Field of study: Literary Criticism

Deborah Lutz, University of Louisville

Field of study: English Literature

Tanya Pollard, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Field of study: Early Modern Studies

Michael Rothberg, University of California, Los Angeles

Field of study: Literary Criticism

Contribute to an MLA Volume

The volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of William Carlos Williams, edited by Daniel Burke, Elin Käck, and Mark C. Long, is now in development in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature. Instructors who have taught William Carlos Williams’s works are encouraged to contribute to the volume by completing a survey about their experiences. Information about proposing an essay is available at the end of the survey.

Contribute to an MLA Volume on Teaching Cervantes’s Theater and Novelas ejemplares

The volume Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’s Theater and Novelas ejemplares, edited by Carmen Hsu and Carmela Mattza, is now in development in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature. Instructors who have taught Miguel Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, plays, and entremeses are encouraged to contribute to the volume by completing a survey about their experiences. Information about proposing an essay is available at the end of the survey.

 

 

 

MLA Awarded $1.5 Million Mellon Grant

Humanities programs and departments frequently lack the money and the time to gather resources and initiate large-scale changes. We’re excited to offer departments the support they need to create more equitable language and literature programs.

—MLA Executive Director Paula M. Krebs

The MLA is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant of $1.5 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to promote recruitment and retention of students in the humanities, especially students of color, first-generation college students, and Pell Grant recipients. In 2023, the association will launch Pathways: Recruitment, Retention, and Career Readiness, a program that will equip humanities departments and programs with the tools, networks, knowledge, and resources to help students find success throughout their education and after graduation.

The MLA sees many successful recruitment, retention, and career-readiness interventions, especially at access-oriented institutions, through its MAPS (MLA Academic Program Services) programming every year, and this new funding will enable the association to cultivate and share many more such activities and programs. Over the next three years, the program will provide small curriculum or programming grants as well as gather best practices into a tool kit to be shared with departments, institutions, and individuals across higher education. The tool kit will help humanities programs build more equitable practices. Along with many other resources, it will include models for creating more welcoming environments for students and tips for advisors on students’ career preparation. 

The grant will also fund attendance at the MLA’s in-person summer seminar and virtual leadership institutes for department and program leaders from access-oriented institutions (AOIs). These convenings will offer leaders the opportunity to attend workshops, share strategies, build collaborations, and learn from model programs. In addition, the grant will enable the MLA to expand the MLA Institutes on Reading and Writing Pedagogy, supporting the creation of new institutes that will bring together doctoral students in English and other languages with new faculty members from AOIs to focus on the needs of students and the working conditions of faculty members at AOIs. 

The Pathways program is one element of the MLA’s efforts to make the study of the humanities available to a wider array of students. Too often departments lack structures that would allow them to first reach and then retain students of color, first-generation students, and Pell grant recipients. The Pathways program will support the creation of these structures and, in turn, make language and literature programs more robust and responsive to the needs of all students. “The skills developed by humanities study, including critical analysis, writing, and language proficiency, make it possible for students to engage with key social, political, environmental, and economic issues,” said Paula M. Krebs, the executive director of the MLA. “Many students from underserved populations want to pursue careers that focus on these issues, but they are pushed away from the humanities by anxiety about employment. The Pathways program aims to alleviate some of this anxiety by establishing new structures of support on campuses across the country, offering students encouraging environments and clear pathways to rewarding careers.”

The MLA’s 2023 summer seminar will take place 1–4 June at Georgetown University. The 2023 leadership institute will be held virtually 21–29 June. The MLA is hosting four Institutes on Reading and Writing Pedagogy during summer 2023, to be held in Virginia, Alabama, Utah, and Massachusetts.

View a video message from Paula Krebs, who shares models of humanities programs that thriving by making changes to meet the needs of all our students. Hear about what’s working and how you can share your success stories with us.

 

 

MLA Members Receive 2023 NEH Grants

Congratulations to the thirty-one MLA members who are among the winners of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants announced in January 2023. Their projects include a digital recovery hub focused on surfacing the work of American women writers; the creation of a humanities and health justice pathways program; a book examining American high school English curriculum as a touchstone of American literary history and culture; and much more.

On 6 March eight additional NEH grant winners were added to this list:

Timothy Arner, Grinnell College

Project Title: The Virtual Viking Longship Project: A Study in the Future of Liberal Arts Teaching and Research

Project Description: The development of a virtual reality model of a Viking Age longship with a team of undergraduate researchers. The project team will document the workflow and learning outcomes to share with other undergraduate institutions

Rebecca Kumar, Spelman College

Project Title: Brown Looks: Theories of Brown Queer Filmmaking since 9/11

Project Description: Research and writing for two essays examining the self-representation of new categories of ethnic identification in US media in the last twenty years.   

Mary McAlpin, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Project Title: Rationalizing Rape: The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the scientific, literary, and philosophical discourse on sexual violence during the French Enlightenment.

Wendy Roberts, SUNY Research Foundation, Albany, State University of New York

Project Title: Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poetic Worlds

Project Description: Transcription of archival documents and writing a book on Phillis Wheatley Peters’s (c. 1753–84) poetry production in the context of transatlantic manuscript culture.

Christine Ruotolo, University of Virginia

Project Title: Project Title: Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature, 1400–1925

Project Description: The continuing development of the open educational resource, Literature in Context, an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English in partnership with scholars and students from Marymount University.

Jennifer Stoever, SUNY Research Foundation, Binghamton, State University of New York

Project Title: Living Room Revolutions: Black and Brown Women Collecting Records, Selecting Sounds, and Making New Worlds in the 1970s Bronx

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book about hip-hop history, showing how the record collections and home-DJ practices of Black women and Latinas in the 1970s Bronx shaped the artform’s birth, sound, and development.

Aviva Taubenfeld, Albany Research Foundation for the State University of New York

Project Title: Building Community and Belonging for Hispanic Students through the Humanities

Project Description: The creation of an advanced course, a community-wide speaker series, and digital humanities resources for the study and teaching of Spanish language and culture for heritage speakers.

Melanie Walsh, Cornell University

Project Title: BERT for Humanists

Project Description: The development of case studies about and professional development workshops on the use of BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers) for humanities scholars and students interested in large-scale text analysis.


Maikel Alendy, Florida International University

Project Title: Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction: Building a Digital Library of Teaching Resources for Interdisciplinary Curricula

Project Description: A three-year project for development and curricular integration of a digital library of interdisciplinary teaching materials exploring connections between science and fiction.

Kyoko Amano, University of Houston, Victoria

Project Title: Interdisciplinary Humanities for a Diverse Campus: Building Minors in Race, Gender, and Disability Studies 

Project Description: The creation of interdisciplinary minors in three areas: race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, and disability studies.

Marissa Ambio, Hamilton College

Project Title: Curatorial Studies: Expanding the Impact of the Humanities through Interdisciplinary and Experiential Partnerships

Project Description: A two-and-a-half-year project to develop an interdisciplinary program and minor in curatorial studies.

Maria Letizia Bellocchio, University of Arizona, Tucson

Project Title: Italian Language and Culture Curriculum Redesign

Project Description: A three-year project to develop curriculum and open educational resources for interdisciplinary courses in Italian language and culture.

Jeffrey Berglund, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff

Project Title: A Journey of Striving: Literary and Creative Expressions of Diné (Navajo) Becoming

Project Description: Research and writing of a book on how Diné (Navajo) principles of homeland, kinship, beauty, harmony, and shared memories are reflected in their literature, music, and film.

Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Project Title: American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability

Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining how early American conceptions of national security are expressed in its literature and other media.

Jessica DeSpain, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

Project Title: Recovery Hub for American Women Writers

Project Description: The continued development and implementation of a digital recovery hub focused on surfacing the work of American women writers and promoting scholarship on their literary contributions.

Elizabeth Drumm, Reed Institute

Project Title: Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s La media noche: Visión estelar de un momento de guerra

Project Description: Preparation of an English-language translation and critical edition of Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s chronicle of World War I, La media Noche: Visión estelar de un momento de guerra (Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War) (1917).

Stefani Engelstein, Duke University

Project Title: The Emergence of the Concept of Opposite Sexes around 1800 in German Literature, Science, and Nature Philosophy

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the scientific concept of “Opposite Sexes” in nineteenth-century German scientific and scholarly discourse.

George Hoffmann, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Project Title: The Price of Peace of French Pacification Policy, 1560–98

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on religious toleration policies in early modern France (1560–98).

Tonya Howe, University of Virginia

Project Title: Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature, 1400–1925

Project Description: The continuing development of the open educational resource Literature in Context, an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English in partnership with scholars and students from Marymount University.

Harris Kornstein, University of Arizona, Tucson

Project Title: Enchanting Technology: Obfuscation, Play, and Other Queer Strategies for Countering Surveillance Capitalism

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book about how queer and trans people expand traditional approaches to privacy and counter surveillance by creatively exploiting the features of mainstream technology.

Tracy Leavelle, Creighton University

Project Title: Humanities and Health Justice Pathways: Forming First-Generation Professionals

Project Description: A three-year, cross-institutional project between Creighton University and Arizona State University to create a humanities and health justice pathways program.

Andrew Leiter, Lycoming College

Project Title: Enhancing the Digital Humanities as Experiential Undergraduate Research

Project Description: A two-year project to build the college’s digital humanities capacity through undergraduate research about campus history.

Laura McGrath, Temple University, Philadelphia

Project Title: Literary Agents and American Literature

Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining the role of the literary agent in shaping the marketplace and the literary attitudes of readers.

Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University, State University of New York

Project Title: The High School Canon: The History of a Civic Tradition

Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining American high school English curriculum as a touchstone of American literary history and culture.

John O’Brien, University of Virginia

Project Title: Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature, 1400–1925

Project Description: The continuing development of the open educational resource, Literature in Context, an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English in partnership with scholars and students from Marymount University.

Mariana Past, Dickinson College

Project Title: Unbroken Nostalgia: An Annotated Translation of the Haitian-Cuban Poetry by Hilario Batista

Project Description: Preparation of a trilingual (English, Spanish, Kreyol) translation and critical edition of Unbroken Nostalgia: Haitian Kreyol Poetry in Cuba by Hilario Batista Félix (1955– ), an important Haitian-Cuban writer.

Lisa Rhody, CUNY Research Foundation; Graduate Center, City University of New York

Project Title: Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology

Project Description: The continued development of the Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology (DHRIFT) platform to provide technical training in digital humanities methodologies with a particular focus on faculty and staff members for historically under-resourced institutions.

Victoria Troianowski Saramago, University of Chicago

Project Title: Against the Current: Electricity and Cultural Production in Brazil’s Anthropocene

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the cultural legacy of electrification in Brazil from the 1930s to the present.

Jesse Schwartz, CUNY Research Foundation; LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York

Project Title: America’s Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, Eurasianism, and the Race of Radicalism

Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining the origins and shifts of American political perceptions of Russia as captured in print culture from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Lisa Siraganian, Johns Hopkins University, MD

Project Title: The Personhood Problem, from Corporations to Trees: Synthesizing Political and Philosophical Debates on Persons

Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on legal and philosophical concepts on personhood—from humans to corporations, algorithms, animals, and the environment.

Rhona Trauvitch, Florida International University

Project Title: Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction: Building a Digital Library of Teaching Resources for Interdisciplinary Curricula

Project Description: A three-year project for development and curricular integration of a digital library of interdisciplinary teaching materials exploring connections between science and fiction.

 

Response to Florida Violations of Shared Governance and Academic Freedom

The MLA’s professional standards on academic freedom and shared governance, including the MLA Statement on Academic Freedom (2014)Tool Kit on Academic Freedom, and Tool Kit on Shared Governance, are clear. The political machinations in Florida that have resulted in what dismissed New College of Florida president Patricia Okker referred to as a “hostile takeover” are in violation of every standard of shared governance, including those of the MLA and the AAUP. In addition, the Florida House of Representatives has put out a call for the names of faculty members and courses that support the universities’ diversity initiatives, and students in Florida now have the right to record instructor speech without the consent of the instructor. These encroachments are related to the work of the humanities in promoting liberal learning, critical thinking, and especially critical thinking about race. We urge you to use the standards and guidelines of the profession to shore up shared governance on your campus and to ensure that faculty members and administrators work together to maintain academic freedom and build equitable practices on your campus and across higher education.

Update (16 February): The MLA and other members of the American Council of Learned Societies have signed a joint statement in support of academic freedom and the New College of Florida. Read the statement and find out how to sign on as an individual supporter.