New Year’s at the MLA

While you’re getting started on your New Year’s resolutions, we’re knocking one off of our own bucket list: We’ll be kicking off 2017 with our friends at the Modern Language Association (MLA) at their annual convention in Philadelphia.

Several thousand English professors will be in the City of Brotherly Love to attend about 800 panels featuring a couple thousand of their peers on topics near to the heart of most academics: Not only do they give a new twist to old favorites of theirs but they also preview the studies and core curricula of college students everywhere.

Thus, you can pretty much match up MLA convention topics with course offerings at most accredited colleges and universities. Here, try it:

8. Foucault and Queer of Color Critique
9. Reimagining Adolescence: Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
10. Visible and Visual Boundaries of Disability
11. The Rise of the Celebrity Chef

And my favorite:

35. Spaces and Architectures of Boredom—which sounds like a good title for our report on the MLA

There is also:

41. Trespassing on Boundaries with Women’s Archives (Maybe they should put signs on them?)
42. We can’t stop talking about Elena Ferrante. (Gee, we never started!)

And that’s just from the first two hours of the first day of the four-day conference. It’s gonna be a long week….

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