This month’s member spotlight features Chantelle Warner, a twenty-five-year member of the MLA who is a member of the MLA Publications Committee. Read about how Chantelle has built connections and found support through her participation in MLA activities:
“I have benefited from different MLA initiatives at several stages of my career. As a graduate student, I first encountered the Linguistics and Literature Forum as a presenter and was later elected to its Executive Committee. Working alongside faculty from different institutions and disciplines around a shared area of interest offered me an invaluable apprenticeship in the profession. A few years ago, I began a second term of service on an Executive Committee, this time with the Forum on Applied Linguistics, which I subsequently represented in the Delegate Assembly. These experiences were formative in expanding my sense of professional identity: I came to see myself not only as a teacher-scholar within my areas of expertise, but also as a member of a broader intellectual community and as a public communicator and advocate for the humanities. I now serve on the MLA Publications Committee, where I have been able to engage in another form of professional stewardship by helping to shape resources that support humanities teaching and research. My institutional home, the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona, is an active member of the Strategic Partnership Network, which has been yet another way for me to participate in and help foster the community of practice that MLA supports.”
Recommended resource: “At the risk of being too broad, I recommend that people take advantage of as much of what MLA offers as possible. Above all, I encourage humanities scholars to become active members: attend a forum meeting, webinar, or panel on a topic that interests you, and look for ways to participate. Our scholarship is often pursued individually, but our work has greater impact when we engage collectively—and the MLA provides an important space for bringing that collective work together and sustaining it.”
Is there someone you’d like to nominate for the MLA member spotlight? Email suggestions to outreach@mla.org.