The MLA celebrates the life of Sandra Gilbert, an internationally renowned critic, poet, and educator, who died on 10 November 2024 in Berkeley, California. A giant of feminist literary theory and a beloved professor, Gilbert shaped the minds of countless students and scholars for more than five decades.

Gilbert was born in New York City in 1936. She graduated with a BA from Cornell University and went on to earn an MA from New York University and a PhD in English literature from Columbia University in 1968. After receiving her PhD, Gilbert taught at California State University, Hayward, and at Indiana University before landing at the University of California, Davis, in 1976. Gilbert left UC Davis in 1985 to become C. Barnwell Straut Chair of English at Princeton University but returned to UC Davis four years later, eventually retiring in 2005 as distinguished professor emerita.

A master of multiple literary genres, Gilbert published eight books of poetry, multiple volumes of literary theory, and a memoir. She is perhaps best known for her landmark work of feminist criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, which she coauthored with Susan Gubar and published in 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic remains a staple of literature classes, and Gilbert and Gubar continued to work together over the years, cowriting several more books and coediting The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism.

Gilbert was widely acclaimed as one of the most influential theorists of her generation, receiving honorary degrees from Wesleyan University in 1988, Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004, and Harvard University in 2017 in recognition of her pioneering scholarship. She was awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.

An active member of the MLA, Gilbert joined the organization in 1961 and was elected second vice president in 1994. She became the president of the organization in 1996, and you can read “Shadows of Futurity: The Literary Imagination, the MLA, and the Twenty-First Century,” the presidential address Gilbert gave at the 1996 MLA Annual Convention.

Congratulations to the eight MLA members who were awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grants in August 2024! Their projects include a database of Catherine the Great’s correspondence, a biography of the Romantic-era poet Jane Taylor, an in-person AI literacy institute, a conference on the aesthetics of solidarity in art by Arab Americans, and more.

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, University of Southern California
Project Title: Encoding Empire: Exploring the Correspondence of Catherine the Great
Project Description: Further development of a database of Catherine the Great’s correspondence, as well as tools for scholarly analysis and editing.

Renée Fox, University of California, Santa Cruz
Project Title: Great Expectations in the Global Imaginary
Project Description: A three-week residential institute for twenty-five high school teachers to explore global approaches to Great Expectations. 

Judith Pascoe, Florida State University
Project Title: Twinkle, Twinkle: Female Literary Ambition, Male Genius, and the Most Famous Poet You’ve Never Heard Of
Project Description: Writing a biography of the Romantic-era poet Jane Taylor (1783–1824), emphasizing the gender and market context in which she wrote. 

Daniel Sinykin, Emory University
Project Title: Post45 Data Collective: Enhancing Cultural Data Documentation, Interoperability, and Reach
Project Description: Continuing work on the digital infrastructure for the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data after 1945. This stage will support the development of a comprehensive data style guide and set of protocols for interoperability with complementary datasets.

Kathryn Conrad, University of Kansas Center for Research, Inc.
Project Title: AI and Digital Literacy: Toward an Inclusive and Empowering Teaching Practice
Project Description: An in-person institute hosted by the University of Kansas and focused on teaching critical AI literacy to secondary, community college, and college-level humanities instructors. 

Salah Hassan, Michigan State University
Project Title: Aesthetics of Solidarity by Arab American and Arab Diaspora Artists in the United States, 1948–Present
Project Description: A conference on expressions of solidarity in art by Arab American artists.

Kalenda Eaton, University of Oklahoma, Norman
Project Title: The Visual West
Project Description: A four-week residential institute in Norman, Oklahoma, for twenty-five college and university faculty members on visual imagery, material culture, and conceptions of the American West. 

Allison Schachter, Vanderbilt University
Project Title: The Rokhl Brokhes Project 
Project Description: Preparation for print publication of twenty stories in English translation by Rokhl Brokhes (ca. 1899–1945), a modern Yiddish woman writer who was murdered by the Nazis.

Congratulations to the twenty-seven MLA members who were awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grants in April 2024! Their projects include a book on the rise of public libraries during the US Reconstruction, the development of an undergraduate major in climate communication, a traveling exhibition about the maritime practices of the African diaspora in the Pacific, the creation of AI-related humanities curricula, and more. 

Rebecca Babcock, University of Texas, Permian Basin
Project Title: Mending Mental Gaps: Negotiating Combat Trauma via Visual/Textual Humanities
Project Description: A two-year project for sixty veterans that utilizes visual arts and multiple text formats to discuss healing after military trauma. 

Sheila Bauer-Gatsos, Dominican University
Project Title: Humanities Contexts for Connecting Social Justice and Sustainability
Project Description: A two-year series of faculty development workshops focused on social justice and sustainability.

Emily Bernate, St. Edward’s University
Project Title: Oral History and Identity: Developing an Oral History Curriculum for First-Generation College Students
Project Description: A two-year curricular project to develop a two-course sequence in oral history.

Jamie Bronstein, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Project Title: The “Insanity” of Colonialism: Mental Health in New Mexico, 1889–1930
Project Description: Research and writing for a book examining the history of the development of mental health services in what became the state of New Mexico. 

Caroline Collins, Maritime Museum Association of San Diego
Project Title: Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific
Project Description: Implementation of an interactive temporary exhibition and traveling banner exhibition exploring maritime practices of the African diaspora in the Pacific. 

Lindsey Eckert, Florida State University
Project Title: Romanticism Bound: British Bookbinding and the Forms of Literature
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a monograph on the history of commercial bookbinding in eighteenth-century Britain and its effects on literature.

Brent Edwards, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Project Title: Long-term Research Fellowships at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem
Project Description: Eighteen months of stipend support (3 fellowships per year) for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

Norrell Edwards, Le Moyne College
Project Title: Publishing Today: Reconnecting the Humanities Ecosystem and Uplifting Contemporary Stories and Literature from Marginalized Communities
Project Description: A two-year project to develop a new course for English majors focused on twenty-first-century literature, media, and criticism.

Tarez Graban, Florida State University
Project Title: Rhetoric, Feminism and the Transnational Archive
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on how archival memory shapes African feminist legacies in South and West Africa.

Christopher Hager, Trinity College, CT
Project Title: The Public Library and the Unfinished Civil War
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on how the ascendancy of US public libraries during the Reconstruction Era (1863–77) has shaped their subsequent history.

Michael Hall, Virginia Commonwealth University
Project Title: Between Leisure and Servitude: Postcards and the Early Cultural History of African American Travel, 1850–1945
Project Description: Research and writing for a book on visual images of African Americans in leisure contexts from slavery through the Jim Crow era.

Matthew Kilbane, University of Notre Dame
Project Title: The Ends of Poetry: Community Writing and the Unreadable Archive
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book exploring the social meaning and function of “lay writing,” or practices of writing that exist beyond institutions and universities, through an examination of late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century community writing workshops.

Johanna Kramer, Curators of the University of Missouri
Project Title: Proverbs in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of proverbs in The Canterbury Tales.

Maria Anna Mariani, University of Chicago
Project Title: As I Write Dying: Memoirs of the End
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on how contemporary authors such as Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), Jenny Diski (1947–2016), and Ruth Picardie (1964–97) have chronicled their deaths in public writing for a mass audience.

Rituparna Mitra, Emerson College
Project Title: Developing a New Climate and Sustainability Communication Major
Project Description: A one-year project to develop a new interdisciplinary undergraduate major in climate and sustainability communication. 

Sarah Moody, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Project Title: Remembering Enslavement, Shaping Freedom: The Afrocubana Authors of Minerva
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a journal article about Minerva, a magazine that was written and produced by free women of color in Cuba during the 1880s.

Eleanor Paynter, Brown University
Project Title: Migration, Farmworker Movements, Contested Belonging, and “Up/Rootedness” in Italy’s Changing Landscapes, 1861–Present
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on the role migrant farmworkers have played in shaping Italian conceptions of race, citizenship, and belonging from Italian unification to the present.

Lisa Ann Robertson, University of South Dakota
Project Title: Religious Dissent and British Romantic Science, 1730–1830
Project Description: Archival research leading to a book on how Protestant educational institutions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain facilitated and shaped scientific inquiry, including granting opportunities for women and atheists to contribute to scientific discourse. 

Sidonia Serafini, Georgia College and State University
Project Title: Cultivating Citizenship: Racial and Environmental Justice and African American Writing at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, 1890–1925
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book on conceptions of citizenship in African American agricultural and nature writings produced at two HBCUs: Hampton Institute (Virginia) and Tuskegee Institute (Alabama).

Erika Stevens, Walters State Community College, TN
Project Title: Spanish for the Professions
Project Description: A two-year project to develop Spanish courses related to students’ professional goals.

Emily Todd, Eastern Connecticut State University, and Miriam Wallace (co–project director), University of Illinois, Springfield
Project Title: Developing a Public Liberal Arts Humanities Curriculum: Empowering Students to Navigate an AI World
Project Description: A one-year grant to develop AI-related humanities curricula at five public liberal arts colleges. 

Annette Vee, University of Pittsburgh
Project Title: Public-Facing Scholarship on Automating Writing
Project Description: Writing two essays on how writing processes have been distributed between people and technologies across history: from eighteenth-century Enlightenment era androids that automated human activities to large language models of today represented in platforms such as ChatGPT.

Sarah Wadsworth, Marquette University
Project Title: In Deepest Sympathy: An Anthology of Letters from the Nineteenth Century
Project Description: Research for an anthology of nineteenth-century letters relating to death and the social rituals and attitudes that attended it in the period.

Anna Wainwright, University of New Hampshire, Durham
Project Title: Race, Gender, and Women’s Writing in Renaissance Italy
Project Description: Research and writing leading to a book exploring the role of women authors in shaping and reinforcing conceptions of race in early modern Italy.

Robyn Warhol, Ohio State University, Columbus
Project Title: The Part Issue Project: Making Nineteenth-Century Serial Temporality Discoverable and Accessible in HathiTrust
Project Description: Digitization of 194 serialized Victorian novels at the Harry Ransom Center, Princeton University Library, Ohio State University Library, and New York Public Library for inclusion in the HathiTrust with enhanced metadata and a virtual library of this “serialized fiction” collection as well as addition to the Reading Like a Victorian website.

Nan Wolverton, American Antiquarian Society
Project Title: Long-term fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society
Project Description: Twenty-five months of stipend support (6 fellowships per year) for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The MLA celebrates the life of the author, teacher, and arts administrator Joel Conarroe, who died on 28 April 2024 in the Bronx, New York. A critical figure in the American literary sphere, Conarroe led the MLA, the PEN American Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation at various points throughout his life and championed the work of thousands of scholars. 

Conarroe studied English at Davidson College, graduating in 1956. He received a master’s in English from Cornell University in 1957 and a PhD from New York University in 1966. After graduating from NYU, Conarroe joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. He spent almost two decades at Penn, during which he served as chair of the English department and, later, as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Conarroe’s time as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania overlapped with that of the novelist Philip Roth. The two enjoyed a close, decades-long friendship, with Conarroe often providing Roth with feedback on his manuscripts.

Conarroe became executive director of the MLA in 1978, holding that position until 1983. During his tenure as executive director, Conarroe was also the editor of PMLA, making him the last MLA executive director to hold both positions simultaneously. After leaving the MLA, Conarroe went on to lead the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1985 until 2003. He was a trustee of the foundation until his retirement in 2016, upon which he was appointed a Trustee Emeritus. He spent time as president of the PEN American Center, vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, and chair of the National Book Award fiction jury and served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury. In addition to cementing himself as an influential tastemaker in the American literary landscape, Conarroe was a respected writer in his own right, publishing books on the works of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman, as well as editing numerous poetry anthologies, including Six American Poets.