Doug Steward, associate director of programs and director of the Association of Departments of English (ADE), died suddenly on 5 November, at the age of fifty. Doug had been central to the ADE since 2003, and he became director in 2017. He did extensive work in support of English departments, graduate students, and, in particular,… Read more »
Posts Categorized: MLA in the News
Florence Howe, Former President of the MLA, 1929–2020
The MLA mourns the passing of former MLA president Florence Howe. A pioneering scholar of feminism, Howe began her career in the 1950s and carved out a space for the discipline of women’s studies at a time when academia was overwhelmingly dominated by men. In 1970, she cofounded Feminist Press with her husband, Paul Lauter…. Read more »
Mario J. Valdés, Former President of the MLA, 1934–2020
The MLA is deeply saddened by the passing of Mario J. Valdés, former president of the MLA and director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Valdés was a distinguished scholar, colleague, and leader whose ambitious and wide-ranging contributions to the study of literature are recognized as landmarks of comparative literary… Read more »
Louis Kampf, Former President of the MLA, 1929–2020
The Modern Language Association mourns the passing of former MLA president Louis Kampf, distinguished professor emeritus of comparative literature and gender and women’s studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kampf is the author of On Modernism: The Prospects for Literature and Freedom (1967) and the coeditor, with Paul Lauter, of The Politics of… Read more »
MLA Awarded Million-Dollar Mellon Grant to Support Teaching at Community Colleges
The MLA is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant of one million dollars by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to strengthen the teaching of English at access-oriented institutions (AOIs). Between 2019 and 2021, the association will organize nine regional summer institutes for those who teach at AOIs and those who would… Read more »
Contribute to a New MLA Volume
You are invited to submit essay proposals for a new nonseries volume in development, Strategies and Perspectives on Social Justice Work, edited by Neal A. Lester. The essays in this volume will tease back the layers of what constitutes social justice theory and praxis and offer perspectives that reveal the many ways allies and supporters… Read more »
MLA Staff Members Lobby for the Humanities on Capitol Hill
As part of its mission, the MLA regularly advocates for federal funding for the humanities in cooperation with other leaders in higher education. On 9 March 2017, the MLA’s director of programs, Dennis Looney, attended a series of meetings on Capitol Hill organized by the Coalition of International Education (CIE). Looney joined a group of… Read more »
In Memory of Robert Scholes, 1929–2016
The Modern Language Association mourns the passing of Robert Scholes, former MLA president and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at Brown University. A founder of Brown’s semiotics program, now the Department of Modern Culture and Media, Scholes was a leading figure in the fields of semiotics and structuralism. In 1966, he and… Read more »
Michael Holquist, Former President of the MLA, 1935–2016
The MLA mourns the recent passing of Michael Holquist, who was president of the MLA in 2007. An accomplished scholar, translator, and editor, Holquist published on a range of subjects from utopian fiction to Dostoevsky but was perhaps best known for his scholarship on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. After tenures in the Slavic departments… Read more »
New Handbook Launches
The eighth edition of the MLA Handbook, which debuted at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference and Bookfair, has received praise for its more streamlined approach to documentation. Created for a digital era in which publications migrate fluidly among different media, the new MLA style emphasizes the elements common to most works instead… Read more »