MLA Preview

As is our custom here at Accuracy in Academia, we are kicking off the new year by bonding with thousands of English professors from around the country and around the world at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention.

Most of the English Departments at American colleges and universities are represented at these yearly conferences. Many freshly minted English grads get hired here, either for their first job or their next one.

For those on the job, the convention allows them to preview new courses and tweak old ones. About a thousand  or more English professors will make presentations to their more numerous peers.

More than 700 presentations and panels are listed on the MLA program for the Seattle meeting this week, the organizations 127^th. We will make as many of these as we can.

Here are a few that we are looking forward to:

• Inter-nature-nality: International Perspectives on Environment
• Early Modern Disabled Bodies and Cultural Discourses
• What Is the Future of French in French Studies?
• Climate Change and the Limits of Representation: Literary History in the Anthropocene
• African Studies / Postcolonial Studies: A Match (Un)Made in Academia
• Race and Digital Humanities
• How to Read the New-York Saturday Press
• Revisiting Emotion and Gender in the Regency
• Transgendering Psychoanalysis
• Class in the Classroom: 2012
• Women for Ecological Justice
• Trauma and Sexuality in Contemporary African American Literature
• What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Sensationalism?
• Genre in the Genome Age
• Rhetoric and/of the Job Market

And that’s just the first of four days.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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