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.
“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.
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.
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.
“It is my honor to serve the MLA as its first vice president of East Asian descent. These pandemic years—with their resurgence of anti-Asian hate, their demands on all of us who care for family members, their suspension of normal schooling—have made clear how scholars and teachers are not disembodied brains but people with other human ties and obligations. I regard these challenges not simply as hurdles but as themselves spurs to critical thinking and imagination.”
— MLA Second Vice President Tina Lu
In December 2022, members elected Tina Lu to the position of second vice president. Lu’s term as second vice president will run through January 2024, and she will become president in January 2025. “Along with her exceptional scholarship, Tina Lu brings impressive leadership experience to the position and a commitment to expanding participation in the humanities,” said MLA Executive Director Paula Krebs. “We are delighted to welcome Professor Lu as the MLA’s second vice president.” David Damrosch (Harvard University), Stacey Lee Donohue (Central Oregon Community College), and Virginia Ramos (University of San Francisco) were elected to at-large seats on the Executive Council for four-year terms. For the full results of the 2022 MLA elections, visit the Elections Results page.
Lu is the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the head of Pauli Murray College at Yale University, where she has taught since 2008. Prior to arriving at Yale, Lu spent ten years as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University.
Lu is a scholar of Chinese literature, focusing particularly on the late imperial period, from around 1550 to around 1750. She is the author of Persons, Roles, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan (2001) and Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (2009). Lu is also a coeditor of Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (2012), part of the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series. She served on the forum executive committee for LLC Ming and Qing Chinese from 2016 until 2018.
The MLA International Bibliography is accepting applications for three-year field-bibliography fellowships. MLA field bibliographers examine scholarly materials and submit bibliographic and indexing information for citations in the bibliography. Open to all MLA members, including graduate students, the 2023 fellowships will run from 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2026.
Field bibliographers perform a valuable service for the profession and receive institutional recognition while deepening their knowledge of the field as well as their research skills. The MLA provides materials and training and waives registration fees for fellows attending training sessions at the MLA convention. On completion of the fellowship, fellows receive a $500 stipend and a certificate at the convention awards ceremony.
For more information and to submit an application, visit the MLA Bibliography Fellowships page. Applications are due 15 March 2023.
The volume Teaching the American Essay, edited by Stephanie Redekop, is now in development in the MLA Options for Teaching series. To learn more about the volume and how to propose an essay, please visit the MLA website. Please send abstracts and CVs to the editor by 15 February 2023.
The MLA International Bibliography congratulates the 2022 Fellowship Award recipients:
The fellows, who have contributed to the bibliography from 2019 to 2022, will be awarded a certificate of accomplishment and a check for $500 during the 2023 MLA Awards Ceremony, which takes place at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, 6 January, at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis (Yerba Buena Salon 7). We offer our sincere thanks and appreciation for their service to the MLA International Bibliography!
Congratulations to Wai Chee Dimock, who will receive the Association of Departments of English’s Francis Andrew March Award, to Ofelia García, who will receive the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession, and to Dennis Looney, who will receive the ADFL Special Recognition for Outstanding Advocacy Work. Dimock is the William Lampson Professor Emerita of American Studies and English at Yale University. She has served as editor of PMLA and advised a multitude of influential cultural and scholarly organizations. García is professor emerita of urban education and of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino cultures at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research, pedagogy, and activism have motivated generations of language scholars and inspired transformative teaching practices. Looney has long been an ardent advocate for the teaching of world languages and literatures, as a professor of Italian studies at the University of Pittsburgh and as the MLA’s former director of programs and the ADFL. The awards will be presented during the MLA Awards Ceremony, which will take place on 6 January.
Wai Chee Dimock, Ofelia García, and Dennis Looney
The Modern Language Association congratulates the three MLA members who were named 2022 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of their contributions to literature and language studies.
